Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick.
- Chadwick, Edwin, 1800-1890.
- Date:
- 1882
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick. 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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![Disunity of works maintained where unity necessary for effi- ciency and economy in the Metro- polis. combined central supervision acquainted with sound principles of sanitary works. For the reception of the fouled water were provided chiefly tubular sewers, which by their ordinary dry weather flow were proved to be self-cleansing and to need no flushing. For the lower districts a concentrated flow and a quick discharge by engine power from sumps was prepared. For the relief of the low-lying marsh districts, which are a great source of the fogs of the Metropolis, a separate system was in prepa- ration on the principle of the successful drainage of the fen districts of Lincolnshire. From the results of the rudimentary ap])lications of the sanitary principles executed in some twenty towns, as at Croydon, where the whole of the fouled water is out of the houses and out of the town on the land in some two hours, there can be no doubt that all the matter of putre- faction which now remains in ill-drained houses and the sewers of deposit for months and years would have been removed from the Metropolis to the fields of the application at considerable distances within half a day, with the result obtained in those several instances quoted, of a reduction of the general sickness and death-rate by at least one-third. But to eftect this, entire unity over the whole Metropolis was essential for the combina- tion to be eflfected by very special science. It would be too long, and beside the present purpose to state how the sanitary authority which had prepared this was set aside by a surprise-vote against the Government, by combined adverse interests at a morning sitting, and how the succeeding political President of the Board brought in a ' Bill' for the government of metropo- litan works, by which all the requisite unity was destroyed; with the entire omission of the essential part of the system—the house drainage; and a bill was passed to effect the disunity by placing the trunk lines of the sewers under one authority and the branch lines under thirty-six others, and those others, of all authorities for dealing with a scientific work, the vestries ! Under such rule the old conditions of the ordinary epidemics are maintained. On a recent examination of some mile of trunk scAver which was a foot deep with putrid deposit, a line giving off fever into the pubUc oiJices was discovered which, combined Avith bad house drainage and the foul sewage of the rest of the district, recently occasioned the loss of Dean Stanley. It is not unfair to observe that the President who, left to our officers and the partial use of our measures, without the increased expe- rience that would have been available for the task of meeting the second extraordinary visitation of the cholera, in 1854, and who brought in the measure which I have described as eftecting the egregious subsisting disunity of works, which, if the con-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22278060_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
