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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    It is impossible to overlook the classes more likely to be affected by the water hypothesis, equally as it is of the estimation in which it is commonly received. I have already said, and to this I adhere, that nineteen out of twenty of the adults who have perished were not water-drinkers even oc- casionally, except in the ordinary cooking of their food. Then again, those who have been water-drinkers, teetotallers especially, have been pre-eminently exempt. The City of London Temperance Society, at the head of which is the Chamberlain, Mr. Scott, informs me, through their Secretary, that out of several hundreds, a large body of whom live in the Tower Hamlets, only three, one man and two women, and those under exceptional circumstances, have died from the commencement of the epidemic. I am acquainted with numbers of families, some with filtration, others without, who have gone on drinking water all the season without almost a single case of diarrhoea. The Sons of Phoenix, a Total Abstinence Society, all living within the limits of the East London water, numbering 1,250 besides their families, have lost only two of the fraternity from the Cholera. The United Phoenix, another society of 1,400 members, have only lost three males and two females. At a brass-founder’s in the Back-road, a number of men are employed, an occupa- tion inducing great thirst, and I am credibly informed that each man during the summer was in the habit daily of drinking a gallon of water on the average, without a single case of diarrhoea occurring. At 14, Love Lane, Ratcliff, the mother, husband, and sister died, who were not drinkers of water, but practised moderation. The five children escaped altogether from an attack of diarrhoea, while, to use her own words, they were doing nothing else but “ drinking water aU the summer and all day long.”* Let me add, pretty generally amongst all classes the theory of the water poison is repudiated, especially among the poor, who have chiefly felt the shock j and this opinion is very commonly shared by professional men. I have already expressed an opinion that the great local nuisances have probably had their part quite as much as the water, and much more, in the production of Cholera. The Lea Cut and Regent’s Canal were intolerable during the hot weather in June, when on one day the thermometer was 165 degrees in the sun. Then look at the Bow Creek, into which was pumping all this time the sewage of 70,000 inhabitants, including Stratford, West Ham, and all about Victoria Dock. And am I to be told that such abominations Many such cases are found.