8 
INTRODUCTION. 
times taints the air for a mile round. Very few of the tene¬ 
ments have any water-supply; the wells are useless, or worse 
than useless, through the contamination of their water with 
putrescent liquid which filters down into them; and the 
drainage of the dwellings both for men and pigs is almost 
entirely superficial, being chiefly discharged into a stagnant 
piece of water called the “ Ocean,” which is covered with 
a filthy slime and bubbles with poisonous gases, and very 
commonly has dead dogs or cats floating on its surface. It is 
difficult to conceive anything more horribly offensive than 
the rears of some of the houses, whose yards are filled with 
ordure and other filth collected for manure, which is here 
stored for weeks, or even months, until an opportunity occurs 
for selling it. And even the public ways are generally 
covered with black putrescent mire. How, during ten 
months of the year 1852, when no epidemic prevailed, as 
many as forty deaths occurred in the Potteries, out of a 
population of about one thousand,—the mortality being 
thus at the rate of 48 per thousand annually; and no 
fewer than four-fifths of these deaths occurred at, or beneath, 
five years of age. In the first ten months of 1849, when 
cholera was prevalent, the number of deaths was fifty, or 
about one in twenty of the whole population, twenty-one of 
these being due to cholera and diarrhoea, and twenty-nine to 
typhus and other diseases.—On the other hand, in the whole 
population of the “ Model Lodging-houses,” amounting to 
1,343, only seven deaths took place in the whole twelve 
months of 1852, or at the rate of scarcely more than 5 per 
thousand; and although they contain a large proportion of 
children, yet only half the number of deaths occurred below 
ten years old. During the prevalence of the cholera-epidemic, 
no cases of that disease occurred among them, although it was 
raging in their various neighbourhoods; and from the time 
that their drainage has been rendered thoroughly efficient, no 
case of fever has presented itself among their inmates. 
The experience of Cholera-epidemics is peculiarly valuable, 
on account of the marked tendency of this disease to search 
out and expose defects, which have continued to produce 
other diseases year after year, without having been suspected 
as the causes of them. The greatest severity in each visita¬ 
tion has shown itself in identical localities, provided those 
