Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A history of Asiatic cholera / by C. MacNamara. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![4^5 same sort should be prevented ; attention should be given to all defects of house drains and sinks through which offensive smells are let into houses; thorough washing and lime-washing of uncleanly premises, especially of such as are densely occupied, should be prac- tised again and again, (c.) Disinfection should be very freely and very frequently employed in and round about houses, wherever there are receptacles or conduits of filth, wherever there is filth-sodden porous earth, wherever anything else, in or under, or about the house, tends to make the atmosphere foul. In the absence of per- manent safeguards, no approach to security can be got without incessant cleansings and disinfections, or without extreme and con- stant vigilance against every possible contamination of drinking water. [For detailed advice on disinfection, see the Office Memor- andum on this subject.] 7. In view of any possibility that the infection of cholera may again be present in this country, it is desirable that in each locality the public should ascertain to whom it has practically to look, in case of need, for its collective safety against such dangers as the above. The responsibility is, in a large proportion of cases, mixed. The most critical of all its branches, the responsibility of providing for the unpollutedness of water-supplies, is, in many very important places, in the hands of commercial companies; and it is to be hoped that these companies, informed as they must be of the calamitous influence which some of their number have exerted in previous epidemics of cholera, will remember, if the disease should again be present here, that each of them, in its daily distribution of water, has hundreds, or even thousands, of human lives in its hands. But, except to that extent, the responsibility for local defences against cholera, both as regards water supply and as regards local cleanli- ness and refuse removal, is vested in the local authorities—the “Sewer Authorities” and “Nuisance Authorities” of recent statutes. These authorities—the Town Councils, Improvement Commissioners, Local District Boards, Boards of Guardians, and select and common Vestries, of their respective areas of jurisdiction—are all, either elec- tively or directly, so constituted as to represent the will of the local rate-paying population; and each such population has had almost absolute means of deciding for itself whether the district which it inhabits shall be wholesomely or unwholesomely kept. It is greatly to be wished that the former of these alternatives had, from long 2 G](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21909957_0479.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
