Cholera : reprints from reports of the Medical Department, for the years 1865-66 and 1873, with preliminary report by the Medical Officer, 1884 / Privy Council and Local Government Board.

Privy Council of the United Kingdom

Date:: 1884

Credit: Cholera : reprints from reports of the Medical Department, for the years 1865-66 and 1873, with preliminary report by the Medical Officer, 1884 / Privy Council and Local Government Board. 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.

10/36 page 10

$Prevention of cholera by proper sanitary constructions. that what gave liim cholera was (mediately or immediately) cholcrn- contagium discharged from another's bowels; that, in short, the diffusion of cholera among us depends entirely upon the numberless filthy facilities which arc let exist, and specially in our larger towns, for the fouling of earth and air and water, and thus secondarily for the infection of man, with whatever contagium may be contained in the miscellaneous outflow!ngs of the population. Excrement-sodden earth, excrement-reeking air, excrement-tainte.l water, these are for us the causes of cholera. That they respectively act only in so far as the excrement is cholera-excrement, and that cholera-excrement again only acts in so far as it contains certain microscopical fungi, may be the truest of all true propositions; but whatever be their abstract truth, their separate application is impossible. Nowhere out of Laputa could their be serious thought of differentiating excremental performances into groups of diarrhoea] and healthy, or of using the highest powers of the microscope to identify the cyliiidro-tffinium for extermination. It is excrement, indiscriminately, which must be kept from fouling us with its decay. And thus it is that my practical advice remains substantially what it has been for years. The local conditions of safety are, above all, the.se two:—(1) that, by appropriate structural works, all the excremental produce of the population shall be so promptly and so thoroughly removed, that the inhabited place, in its air and soil, shall be absolutely without fcecal impurities ; and (2) that the water-supply of the popula- tion shall be derived from such sources, and conveyed in such channels, that its contamination by excrement is imjDOSsible. What good results are got even by rough approximation to those sanitary standards has already been abundantly shown here. The Avay in which the southern districts of London, with their three fourths of a million of population, have gradually gained comparative immunity from cholera in proportion as their two water-companies have ceased to water among them, is matter of familiar distribute sewage-tainted history. And the results to which I have already referred, as found in A'arious towns where works of drainage and water-supply have been provided, are further illustrations to the same effect.* C. Extract from the Repot t (1873^ of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council and Local Government Board {Mr. Simon). I have to report that in 1873, and particularly during much of the second half of the year, Asiatic cholera was more or less prevalent in many parts of continental Europe, and sometimes—as at Paris, Havre, llotterdam and Antwerp—in places which have constant and easy communication with England. In our relations to cholera on the con- tinent of Europe there are at present some points of interest on which I may have occasion to submit to you a supplementary report: but I need not here do more than refer to the Board's actual proceedings as to cholera during the year on which I am reporting. In July 1873, in view of the then circumstances, the Board issued (instead of an Order which had been issued in 1871 by the Lords of the Council) an amended Order prescribing rules for the detention and examination of ships suspected of choleraic infection, and for dealing with cases of actual$