A healthy year in London / [Charles Dickens].

  • Charles Dickens
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A healthy year in London / [Charles Dickens]. 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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    itch before the houses. That has been filled p, and Dodd’s Place has since been remark- bly free from disease. In eighteen hundred nd fifty-four, only three persons in it were attacked by cholera, and not one died. We ^ome to a more fashionable quarter for llfcne other instance. Dr. Lankester is medical iBofficer of health for St. James’s, Westminster. WHe tells us that in the unhealthy Berwick Street division are the model lodging-houses, called Ingestre Buildings. Their mortality last year was at the rate of sixteen in a thousand. With that he contrasts a part of the St. James’s Square division—Burlington Arcade. The rooms there are narrow and small, imperfectly ventilated, and, although not overcrowded, shorten life. The mortality last year among residents in Burlington Arcade was at the rate of thirty in a thousand. Now, let us turn from Saint James to Saint Giles. Dr. George Buchanan, Medical Officer of Health for Saint Giles, tells us that “ the present mortality among infants in Saint Giles’s is such, that a child two years old has a better chance of living to be fifty, than a child at its birth has of living to be two years old.” And so we turn over a new leaf in the history of London during this its healthy year. The little children form by far the largest class of victims to the poison- ing or stinting of our air and food. In foul homes the mortality of children tends to multiply itself, for where more children die, more children are born to feed the jaws of death. Partly this happens, because the perishing of unweaned infants from the mother’s breast is followed speedily by new creations. But there must be another law of nature working, to produce a result so strik- ing as that in healthy districts, where there is one death in fifty-six people, there is one birth in forty-two ; but that in unhealthy dis- tricts where there is one death in thirty-three ! people, there is one birth in twenty-eight. We ; take this into account then, in considering the I large sum of the mortality of infants. Were everything as it should be, the death of a j young child, except by accident, would be a ! rare event. Little ones inheriting no weak- ness from their parents, breathing pure air, i eating pure breac^ and drinking the due i quantity of wholesome milk, would grow to i sturdy manhood, and to comely womanhood, I but there would not be so many of them growing. Families would be little larger than they now are, but they would be com- posed more entirely of children upon the knee, and by the fireside: not many would be moved into the little coffin from the cot. We know what the truth is. Dr. Pavy, Medical Officer of Health for Saint Luke’s, tells that in the Old Street district of his parish, the actual number of the deaths during the healthy year of which we write, was forty-four, twenty-six of them being deaths of children under five years old, and eighteen the sum of deaths at every other age. In the City Eoad district, there died forty-one infants, against twenty-six persons of every age older than five. In the Whitecross Street district, there were seventy- seven deaths, of which no less than fifty-nine were deaths of infants under five years old. Three burials in every four were burials of little children. This is, by far, the worst fact of its kind to be found in the whole budget of sanitary reports now before us. The worst that can be generally said (and with all its local varia- tions, it is a distressing feature in each parish account) is, that one half the deaths are deaths of children under five. And then, as Dr. Barnes reminds the vestry at Shoreditch, | of all the children born among us, only one | half live to the age of fifteen; only one in | three lives to be older than forty ; only one | in five lives to be sixty-one. [ To account for such figures as these, we | will now take from the reports one or two | illustrations of what may be found in London | in a healthy year, to warn us how much | wholesomer and healthier we may become. | Turner’s Eetreat, Bermondsey, is cited by : Dr. Challice, officer of health for that parish, ; as a fever-nest inhabited by persons not of I the poorest description, many of whom are j very cleanly in their habits, but who are | poisoned by want of drainage, who live beset by their own offscourings in a court soaked f by a neighbouring yard in which a manu- facturer keeps a strong solution of dogs’ ex- crement (technically called pure) adjacent to the public thoroughfare. We will quote only one passage more—it is from the Eother- hithe report. We sicken as we read of such homes. They sicken and die, who have to live in them. In Spread eagle Court “ almost 1 all the houses were overcrowded with in- mates, dilapidated, and swarming with bugs. | Many of the inhabitants complained that the | quantity of water forced on by the company | was not sufficient, and certainly the recep- | tacles for it were not generally large enough, s and often dirty and leaky. The drainage has f been originally good, but is everywhere | choked up. Not a house had an ashpit, the vegetable and animal refuse being strewn j about the yards, and mixing their effiuvia with | those from the overflowing cesspools.” We can quote no more of such details. They abound in the reports, and we know that they must abound. The late Sir Henry de la Beche informed me, writes Dr. Lan- | kester of the court district, that when the School of Mines was built on the space be- tween Jerrnyn Street and Piccadilly, for- merly known as Derby Court, no less than thirty-two cesspools had to be emptied and filled up. There is plenty of work, then, to be done everywhere by the boards of works, medical officers of health, and inspectors of nuisances ; and in each of the reports before us there is an accurate chronicle of work