Report of the Medical Officer of Health on defects in the present midden system and on improvements required : ordered by the Health Committee to be printed for the use of members of Council.

Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Medical Officer of Health on defects in the present midden system and on improvements required : ordered by the Health Committee to be printed for the use of members of Council. 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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    experienced on tlie premises, are frequently ignorant of the mod^. by which the night-soil is removed. The list which he possesses numbering 76 tunnels for the convenience of 716 houses, is proba- bly far from complete. It was obtained from the servants of Mr. Rose by Mr. Higgins, to whom also he is indebted for valuable assistance in these investigations. These tunnels may be thus classified :— 1st. Those which are built beneath houses and have the privies as their ventilating shafts. 2nd. Those which, being either covered or partly or altogether open, fill up the narrow space between the backs of contiguous houses, and have for their enclosing sides the walls of cellar kitchens. 3rd. Those which run intricately through blocks of buildings, being partly exposed in intervening spaces, and partly built beneath the houses. 4th. Those which are placed at the distance of a few feet from the residence, and which do no abut on any wall of the houses. As an example of the first class, he will instance a block of terraced houses, into the court-yard of which your Committee con- structed a branch sewer at the public expense. The description, taken from notes made at the period of inspection, will soon belong to things of the past; for the owners, on their attention being called officially to the subject, agreed at once, with good feeling and excellent propriety, to fill up the tunnel, to convert the privies into water closets, and to adopt other plans suggested by the Borough Engineer. His notes state: This locality is a parallelo- gram, bounded and enclosed on the west by the front houses of a street; on the north and east by a high wall reaching beyond the windows of the lower tier of terraces ; on the south by oil mills. The entrance is a passage 15 feet in width ; thus, though not ranked as a closed court, it is without any thorough ventilation. Here ingenuity has accumulated 76 houses, containing, at the period of inspection, families consisting of 529 souls, on a superficial area of 2,346 superficial yards. Beneath these houses are tunnels of the following dimensions, viz., one under the south side 160 feet in length by 6 feet 4 inches in height and 3 feet in width ; one under the north side 145 feet in length by 6 feet 4 inches in height