Drainage and sewerage.

  • Metropolitan Working Classes' Association for Improving the Public Health
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drainage and sewerage. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BIIT8SKJAL L -S? DRAINAGE AND SEWERAGE. 1. —In the Tract on Ventilation the importance of a constant supply of pure air in rooms, workshops, and houses, has been insisted upon. It becomes necessary to shew the various causes existing in the neighbourhood of human habitations by which the air is corrupted. It is obvious that no improvement in the structure of dwellings, and no precaution on the part of the inmates, can secure good air, if those dwellings are sur¬ rounded by open dra ns, reeking dung-heaps, stagnant ponds, and unpaved streets, generating unwholesome gases, which mingle with the common air, and force their way into the living and sleeping apartments of the people. It is, therefore, extremely desirable that the people should be instructed not only in the means by which they can keep up a thorough circu¬ lation of air within their dwellings, but also in those by which it can be kept free from impurities without. This can only be effected by an efficient and complete system of drainage and sewerage. 2. —The concurrent testimony of all the gentlemen engaged in the Health of Towns’ Commission has been, that the ravages of epidemic and contagious diseases may be fairly attributable to bad drainage and bad ventilation. By taking any large town in the kingdom, it will be seen that the localities of epidemic diseases are the close, confined, and uncleansed streets, occupied almost entirely by the poorer classes. It will be observed also, that the track of cholera is nearly identical with that of fever. A map of Leeds is given in the Sanitary Heport, which is highly instructive. In the wards badly cleansed and badly drained, the proportional mortality is nearly double that of the better conditioned districts of the town. In the parish of Bethnal Green we find the same results. The mortality from epidemic diseases falls heavily upon the most crowded and worst parts of the district. Dr. Southwood Smitli says, “ In every district in which fever returns frequently, and prevails extensively, there is uniformly bad sewerage, a bad supply of water, a bad supply of scavengers, and a consequent accumulation of filth.” The history of epidemic diseases proves the same thing. The plague, the black death, the jail fever, the camp fever, the