Special report by Mr. Orton, Medical Officer of Health, upon the cholera epidemic of 1866.

  • Orton, Thomas.
Date:
[1866]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Special report by Mr. Orton, Medical Officer of Health, upon the cholera epidemic of 1866. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Now Bethnal Green is notorious for poverty, overcrowding, and fever, and yet this badly-conditioned district comes out first amongst all in its escape from Cholera. Mile End is next in its immunity, a fact wholly to be explained in the estimation of some probably from two to three thousand good houses having sprung up there of late years. St. George’s has a fearful mortality, but then its overcrowding is great, it exceeds even that of Bethnal Green. But Poplar and Bow District has the least overcrowding of all; where one person is found there, nearly 3 are found in Limehouse, 3| in Mile End, and more than 4 in Bethnal Green, and approaching 6 in St. George’s-in-the-East. When Poplar, then, is seen with the fewest persons to an acre, the highest rental, and the lowest poor rate, having 93 deaths in each 10,000 persons, half as many more than Bethnal Green, it is too obvious to waste a moment about it, there must be other causes at work in this field of destruction besides sewage water, and the River Lea. St. George’s lias 96 deaths in 10,000 persons, but a trifle exceeding that of Poplar, and fully one-third more deaths than Bethnal Green. But the Limehouse District tops all; it has lost 118 persons from Cholera and Diarrhoea, according to the same estimate, since the outbreak in July; a district closely watched over, in which 2,000 houses have come under my personal inspection during the past year, up to July, resulting in many hundred different forms of sanitary reparation. The action of a poison—a water poison or what not—is uniform over a community; it treats all alike under like conditions. But this Old Ford water acts capriciously; it skips about in finding victims; here its devasta- tions are heavy, but there passes by multitudes untouched. Poisons, as a ride, lay low more readily the weak, the poor, the half-starved, and the des- titute ; but these classes in the Cholera epidemic have stood the shock well, they have come foremost out of the fray. It has crushed the scanty popula- tion, it has passed by the overcrowded, spared the poor, laid low the rich, terrible in the houses of a wealthier district, merciful in those of the im- poverished, scarcely felt on a hill, while awfully destructive in a valley. But the water hypothesis is still held to be correct, because the mor- tality is said to have been co-extensive with the water supply. Now how can this arise ? According to the Lancet Commissioner’s investigations for the fortnight ending the 13th of August, there were 3 deaths in St. Botolph’s,