Report on the cholera epidemic of 1866 in England : supplement to the twenty-ninth annual report of the Registrar-General of births, deaths, and marriages in England / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command.

  • Great Britain. General Register Office.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the cholera epidemic of 1866 in England : supplement to the twenty-ninth annual report of the Registrar-General of births, deaths, and marriages in England / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    26/436 (page 20)
    the year 1866 was 19,380,739 gallons daily.* * * § Of this. Captain Tyler says, 11,000,000 gallons are delivered daily from Old Ford, and the rest (8,380,739) from Lea Bridge. With some variation, this is the order of the Tvork :—the engines at Old Ford are started at 5^ in the morning and stopped at 7-J p.m. ; and from 7^ in the evening till 5^ A.M. of the next day the water supply “ is entirely produced from the Lea Bridge station.” f “ The Old Ford engines do not,” says Captain Tyler, work at night or on Sundays.^^ “ The water from Lea Bridge at those times supplies “ the whole district [water field] passing by Old Ford, and even to the Essex i^art “ of the district.”iJ Three hundred miles of street are traversed by the com- pany’s pipes : the pipes of six inches and upwards, called by the engineer ^mains,’ are 147 miles long; while the smaller ‘service pipes,’ some constantly charged, the others turned on once a day, are 328 miles long. § The effect of all this is, that the Lea Bridge waters usually meet the Old Ford waters at a fluctuating line running from Victoria Park, through Bethnal Green, onwards to Spitalfields. Far south of this line the Lea Bridge waters pass on Sunday, and even early in the morning, but only in very rare instances could the Old Ford waters be carried into Hackney north of that line. '» It was precisely in the region of the Old Ford waterfield that cholera raged. 1 There, in three months, it killed little less than 4,000 men, women, and children ; f while in the Lea Bridge field, and in all the other waterfields of London, the epidemic was kept within such narrow limits of fatality as would be accounted for by diffusion through sewers, direct contact with cholera matter in various ways, and the slightly contaminated filtered river waters of the other companies. It must be evident that the dose of cholera matter in a given quantity of the water supplied from Old Ford would vary indefinitely in difi’erent localities ; for -example, assume that the North Woolwich main was filled by water pumped from the covered reservoir before 2 o'clock on the fatal afternoon of July, when the old carpenter confesses that he let in the open pond water, or that it was filled on Sunday with the water of Lea Bridge, and in either case the water of the main would be comparatively pure. In fact as the composition of the Avater in the s upply reservoir would vary from day to day and from hour to hour as the level of the water got lower, and as the tide of the river happened to be in or out, it is evident that the composition of the water in the supply pipes at any given moment would A^ary to an inconceivable extent. But the cholera matter, after it leaA’es the body, undergoes changes of AAdiich some may render it more, others less and less, active from day to day; and, moreover, this flux holds in suspension actiA'e matter heavier than Avater; hence it is probable that in an aggregate of several districts throAvn together, to get rid of accidental disturbances, the effect of the cholera flux will be least in elevated and in remote districts supplied by mains constantly filled. The cholera flux in a six-inch iron pipe, rising for a mile to an elevation of a hundred feet, AAmuld comport itself very much as Ave see it in a glass tube; thus, if the flux Avas equally distributed from the reservoir over the field of a company varying in elevation, the quantity of cholrine in a given quantity of Avater, like the quantity of cholera in a given population consuming that AA^ater, Avould vary with the elevation. The cholrine might also vary Avith the distance of the point of discharge, as the A'elocity of Avater and the quantity of matter it carries in suspension change under most complicated hydraulic laws, to say nothing of the laAvs of the changes affecting xholrine itself. 3. Cholera in the several Waterfields. I now proceed to call attention to the mortality from cholera in the various waterfields of London.|| As their areas correspond Avith none^ of^ the other recognized divisions of London, the 135 sub-districts have been distributed into 15 groups, under the various heads corresponding as nearly as possible with the waterfields. It will be seen that Avhile there is a certain mortality from cholera in * Appendix to Report of Select Committee on East London W ater Bills, Session of 1867, pp.26 6,269, f Evidence of Mr. Greaves before Rivers Commission, Q. 384, page 11. f Captain Tyler’s Report (Parliamentary Paper, p. 16). § Appendix to Report of Select Committee on East London Water Bills, p, 267. 11 Table 33 (Appendix, p. 83).