Report of the Health of London Association on the sanitary condition of the metropolis; : being a digest of the information contained in the replies returned to three thousand lists of queries, which were circulated amongst clergymen, medical men, solicitors, surveyors, architects, engineers, parochial officers, and the public.

  • Health of Towns Association (London, England)
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Health of London Association on the sanitary condition of the metropolis; : being a digest of the information contained in the replies returned to three thousand lists of queries, which were circulated amongst clergymen, medical men, solicitors, surveyors, architects, engineers, parochial officers, and the public. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lous disease exist; and it is proved that a confined, impure air, and the want of exercise, are the chief causes of the prevalence of this disease among the children reared in workhouses, and similar establishments in this and foreign countries. Skin diseases have also their most fertile source in the causes just enumerated. It is unnecessary to notice the ages at which the different di seases produced by these causes chiefly occur; it is suf¬ ficient to refer to the tables of mortality, which prove that inhabitants of country districts (who certainly are not with¬ out some removable causes of disease in and around their dwellings) live till the comparatively long age of thirty-five ; while the inhabitants of Whitechapel die at the premature age of twenty-six. The facts elicited from some of the most eminent pro¬ fessional men in London, are sufficient to prove, that a frightful destruction of life and health, and an awful waste of the means of the poor, are continually going on from causes which ought not to exist; that such agencies are essential causes of debased moral principles, irreligion, pauperism, as well as of the heavy expenses of police, poor- rates, prosecutions, prisons, fever hospitals, orphan asylums, and other charitable institutions. [2.] Have the poor power to remedy these evils ? The replies to this question are in the proportion of six and a-half in the negative to one in the affirmative. Two only of the whole number are partly affirmative, partly negative. It is quite manifest that the poor have no power to correct the faulty construction of their dwellings—they have neither the money, the time, nor the ability to do so. They are compelled to live in the vicinity of their employments, in such houses as they find vacant; but such is the de¬ mand for houses among the poor, that but little choice is afforded to them ; for, to use their own words, “ if one will not take the house another will.” Three-fourths of the poor, moreover, are lodgers, living in single rooms, and still less able than tenants of small houses to effect im¬ provements. Their houses are constructed without either sewers or drains ; they can, therefore, only remove the filth from their dwellings to a neighbouring heap, there to putrefy and contaminate the air. They often attempt to keep the fronts of their houses clean, but generally,