Report on the health of Paddington for the quarter ending Lady-Day, 1872 : with a special report of the small pox epidemic of 1871 / by Wm. Hardwicke.

  • Hardwicke, William.
Date:
[1872]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the health of Paddington for the quarter ending Lady-Day, 1872 : with a special report of the small pox epidemic of 1871 / by Wm. Hardwicke. 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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    42 cases— 12 males, 30 females, reported to the Sanitary- Department from large family mansions, 36 were domestics, of whom 25 were removed to hospital, the others treated at home. Why spreading Diseases are so easily transferred from one person to another. With regard to the spreading of contagious disease, and of the manner in which small-pox in particular is often conveyed, it must be noted that in some streets and places cases have frequently been found in close proximity, or behind the houses in squares and mansions. A butler is perhaps living at home with his family in an adjoining street, or the coachman in the mews at the back, while tailors, milliners, or workwomen, living in close rooms, have to send home work, or go to work, from an infected room ; children again often take these diseases to school.* We have numerous examples of the dangerous facility for propagating contagious diseases by the absolutely poor and indigent, who live in rooms, close and foul, with deficient air, light, and ventilation, or go about without means for personal or household cleansing. They lack not only coals, hot-water, soap, and proper utensils; but the old, infirm, or sick people want physical power to do washing for themselves, and have no means of paying others. These are matters of serious consideration in any attempts to check the ravages of spreading diseases amongst young children of the very poor in large towns. In my annual report for 1868-69, page 15, I suggested sanitary missionaries to supplement our methods of assisting the struggling and deserving poor. Out-door poor-law relief alone is necessarily inadequate to meet all domestic wants. Fate condemns many poor, but highly respectable people to live in the cheapest rooms, and most suspected houses of a poor neighbourhood. There are a number of persons who submit to any amount of privation rather than the degradation incidental to their entering a parish workhouse. The very conditions they live in deprive them of the kindly services of delicate ladies and friends who would be more inclined to visit and help them, if they lived in cleaner rooms, or even in a well-ordered alms house. * The explosion of gunpowder killing a few people is looked upon as a dreadful affair, and the legislation has no scruples in isolating and depriving of their civil right, dangerous lunatics who destroy only a score or so of people annually ; it is equally fair to separate people affected with small pox and malignant fevers, so that death may not fall upon innocent persons who come into contact with them. Children going to school infected or imperfectly cured, observed Sir James Simpson, are more dangerous than a tiger, or a cobra escaping from a travelling menagerie.