Summary of experience on disease, and comparative rates of mortality / by William Lee.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Summary of experience on disease, and comparative rates of mortality / by William Lee. 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.

    24/82 (page 22)
    union, enumerated in his evidence the localities where cholera prevailed in 1832, and then said (p. 11),— Those were also the localities most severely afflicted with it during tlie recent visitation. The town was then in much the same state as to drainage and water supply as it is at present. Mr. Williamson then gives a chronological account of numerous epidemics, but the localities where they were most malignant ai'e the same. He concludes that— The lives of a great portion of those who have perished by the epidemics which I have named might have been saved. This evidence would undoubtedly be equally applicable to most other towns, and yet it exhibits an absence of even common animal instinct with reference to the preservation of life that would be incredible if the facts were not proved beyond dispute. I am not aware that anything has been yet done to im- prove the sanitary condition of Nantwich, although the Local Board was elected in November last. Litton.—Pursuing the consideration of the identity of causes and effects in different parts of the country, there could scarcely be a more remarkable demonstration than that of Litton, a township and village in the High Peak of Derby- shire, at an altitude of more than 1,000 feet above the level of the sea, and with a mountain atmosphere naturally very invigorating. At Messrs. Bagshaw and others property, which consists of a long row of cottages with a narrow court or passage in front, five houses drain'^to an open privy cesspool. I found the privy, only a few feet from two of the houses, in a most digusting condition, so much so that people must stand upon the seat, and the cesspool was reeking with semi-fluid ordure. That it had been long in the same state, and with most fatal consequences, the following facts will show. William Marshall, one of the cottagers, said (p. 6),— I have seen it drain out and overflow, and it has laid in a pool in front of my door, and has actually moved with maggots. James Sheldon's wife, the next door, said,— We smell that privy very disagreeable. We have lived here eight years. The doctor complained of it wlien he attended my children. We had fever in the house last November but one, and lost three children in less than a month. In this village the ^dctims of fever were chiefly tlie young. The mortality from one fever had been equal to a propor- tion of 67^ to a thousand of the whole population wthia the short space of 11 months.