Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Sanitary review of the Session / 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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![For the sake of othei’s than yoiu'selve-s, especially of foreign allies on sanitation, I would offer some explanation of general principles, of which I have elsewhere given, at much length, particular illusti’ations. By the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission and by the first General Board of Health, and also by a Consolidated Commission of Sewers for the Metropolis, plans were got out based on trial works, and on trials on blocks of buildings, for the purification of the houses of the metropolis from stagnant putridity, and also for the purification of the Avhole of the sewers of stagnant deposit in the me- tropolis. These trials related to what I called the separate system, that is sej^arating the sewage from the rainfall, and sending the sewage only to the land, and sending the rainfall and the subsoil water to the river. The order of the work then would be :—First the purification of the house by water carriage and self-cleansing house drains; next the ]mrification of the streets by self- cleansing sewers which shovxld hold no stagnant ])uti’efac- tion and emit no smells; and, lastly, the purification of the river itself. By the economies effected, by small tubular house drains and tubular sewers, three houses and three districts miglit be improved on soxind sanitary principles well, at the cost of doing one on the old system ill. By what I must call a gigantic conspiracy in Parliament as well as out of it, in defence of expensive and profitable work (to the undertakers), and chiefly in deference to the railway engineer who persuaded Lord Palmerston that the cutting of the Suez Canal was impracticable, the Government were persuaded to set aside our plan, and proceed with the river solely at first, on what is called the combined system, by large tunnel sewers of a size to caiTy away storm water, or as much as possible of it,togetherwith the sewage proper. Self-cleansing house drains and sewers by pipes were absolutely condemned, and the large “ man-sized sewers,’’ large enough for men to enter and cleanse them of stagnant deposit were vindicated as necessary to the combined system, on the assumption that the whole of the sewage proper was all to be carried away in long lines from one end of the metropolis to the other. I was for radiating it outwards in shorter directions, and plans were laid out by our specialist sanitary engineers for](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22313059_0009.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
