13© Dr. R. Druiity on Houses in Relation to Health, [May 6, 



The great fevers at Clapham, Croydon, Westminster, and Windsor, 

 were all of this sort, and traceable to this cause ; and instances were 

 given of illness, year after year, visiting a family, and robbing it of one 

 or more lives ; and when too late, the discovery made that an ancient, 

 unknown, and decayed sewer ran under the premises. Many such 

 sewers exist underground, not noticed in any map, and unknown to 

 the present generation of officials ; serving only as reservoirs of foul 

 gases, which find vent through most unexpected channels. 



It is in vain for the physician to discuss remedies, whilst the patient 

 is still breathing the vapours which caused the disease. 



Lastly, the property which diseases have of lurking in certain quar- 

 ters, and then breaking out with virulence, and acquiring a self- 

 propagating force, was ascribed to impurity in general and to defective 

 drainage in particular. Scarlet fever, especially, was asserted by the 

 speaker to be caused ah initio^ as well as to receive power of exten- 

 sion from this source ; but the limits of the hour did not permit him 

 to develop the evidence on this point. Thirteen contagious maladies, 

 at the least, can be produced at will ; and the speaker believed that, 

 in time, epidemic diseases would be found subject to human control ; 

 and that the surest mode of protecting the dwellings of ^e rich was to 

 cleanse and ventilate the dwellings of the poor. 



Diagrams were exhibited, showing the mortality in several parts of 

 the parish of St. George, Hanover-square, by which it appeared that, 

 out of 20,000 inhabitants of first and second class streets there died at 

 home,\n the three years 1856, 1857, and 1858, 10*78 per thousand per 

 annum ; whilst, in third and fourth class streets, there died at home, in 

 those three years, 20* per thousand per annum, exclusive of deaths in 

 hospitals and workhouses. Taking the mews separately, there died 

 at home 15*36 per thousand per annum. 



The mortality and population of several streets during these years 

 was also exhibited in a diagram, which contrasted the low mortality of 

 purely aristocratic, and first-class business streets, with that of the nest 

 of low streets between Grosvenor-square and Oxford-street, where, 

 owing to the crowded and unventilatable state of the houses, there 

 is a mortality of 30 per thousand ; a mortality enhanced, of course, 

 by the deaths of the children who are born but cannot be reared in 

 such habitations. 



[R. D.] 



