Report on the mortality of cholera in England, 1848-49.
- General Register Office Northern Ireland
- Date:
- 1852
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Report on the mortality of cholera in England, 1848-49. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
111/510
![The chief Roman encampments of which traces remain in England, were on the Malvern Hills, the Cotswold Hills, and other high spots, which even, when the country was undrained, must have been healthy. Roman London was on a hill; the West- minster of the monks in a swamp, as Peterborough and other monasteries were, pro- bably for protection from the Northmen and Marauders. Many monasteries and priories were on fine sites. The military posts most easily defended in ancient times against an enemy are the best defences against epidemics; and with the regularity of a general law, the first cities, castles, and temples were on high places. The modern Romans, remarkably enough, inhabit the low alluvial ground (Campus Martius), which the Tiber embraces as the Thames does Southwark, and the low- ground on the opposite banks of the river. The Quirinal and a part of the Capitoline are still covered with habitations; the Palatine, the Esquiline, the Coelian, and the Aventine are deserted; the bells of conventual buildings alone disturb the silence reigning in the waste among the crumbling ruins and vineyards.* * * § Lancisi has traced the history of the great city through all its vicissitudes, until it was deserted by the Roman pontiffs, and its population had dwindled down to thirty-three thousand ; hut he leaves it uncertain when the people descended from the hills.*]* Leo X., who filled the city with strangers, suffered his new colonists to build on the Campus Martius, and the other low grounds were occupied although the houses were infested by the inundations of the Tiber. Tiberinis alluvionibus incolas humilium Urbis regi- onura ssepe diuturnis, ssepe etiarn saevioribus segritudinibus loborasse, luculentius ipsa plebis clades, et luctus testatur, quam ut ab auctoriiate, vel ratione testimonia repeta- mus,J says Lancisi, writing in 1710. Cholera, in four months—July, August, Sep- tember, and October, 1837—destroyed 5419 of these fallen people, who did not exceed 156,000 in number.§ As the power of the Egyptians descended from the Thebaid to Memphis, from Mem- phis to Sais, they gradually degenerated ; notwithstanding the elevation of their towns above the high waters of the Nile, their hygienic laws, and the hydrographical and other great sanatory arrangements which made the country renowned justly or unjustly for its salubrity in the days of Herodotus. The poison of the Delta, in every time of weakness and successful invasion, gradually gained the ascendancy; and as the cities declined, the canals and the embalmments of the dead were neglected,—the plague gained ground. The people, subjugated by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Mamelukes, became what they have been for centuries, and what they are in the present day. Every race that settled in the Delta degenerated, and was only sustained by immigration. So likewise the populations on the sites of all the city-states of antiquity on the coast of Syria, Asia Minor, Africa, Italy, seated like the people of Rome on low ground, under the ruin-clad hills of their ancestors, within reach of fever and plague—are enervated and debased apparently beyond redemption. The history of the nations on the Mediterranean, on the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, the deltas of the Indus and the Ganges, and the rivers of China, exhibits this great fact—the gradual descent of races from the high lands, their establishment on the coasts in cities sustained and refreshed for a season by immigration from the interior; their degradation in successive generations under the influence of the unhealthy earth, and their final ruin, efFacement, or subjugation by new races of conquerors. The * Rome Illustrated, H. Noel Humphreys, p. 23-4. f See in Roman Antiquities, by W. Ramsay, 1851, an admirable digest of the researches of Bunsen and others in their Beschreibung der Rom. See also the tine piece of Medical Topography, by Lancisi, Dissertatio de Nativis, deque adventitiis Romani coeli qualitatibus,— Opera, 1718. Niebuhr says that •‘Rome has now no right to its name; it is an entirely foreign vegetation that has grown upon a part of the old soil, as insignificant and thoroughly modern in its style as possible, without nationality and with- out history. * * * Science is utterly extinct here. * * * The people are apathetic, and truly if ever they were remarkable in any way for personal appearance, they must have strangely altered.”— Life and Letters of Niebuhr, by Bunsen, Brandis, and Loebell. J De Adv. Rom. Coeli, cap. xi. § Report of the Roman Board of Health, cited in Medical Annual, p. 204, 1839. And McCulloch’s Geographical and Statistical Dictionary.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21308251_0111.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
