Report of the General Board of Health on the administration of the Public Health Act and the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts from 1846 to 1854.

  • Great Britain. General Board of Health.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the General Board of Health on the administration of the Public Health Act and the Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts from 1846 to 1854. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    37/126 (page 31)
    It is true that the total annual mortality of towns and districts ravaged by an extraordinary epidemic, is not always increased to the full amount of the numbers who thus perish, because many who are in this manner cut off suddenly would have been destroyed within the year by the slower operation of ordinary and more constantly re- curring epidemics. By the last visitation of cholera, how- ever, more than 40,000 (out of its 72,000 victims) deaths were added to the previous average death-rate. But these ordinary diseases are in themselves preventible, as is shown by the fact that they are for the most part banished from such establishments as those just referred to. Our intervention has been continually besought by clergy- men, medical practitioners, and others on behalf of the labour- ing population in villages, as well as towns, against ordinary epidemics, whose ravages are as great, and upon the whole greater, than those of extraordinary epidemics; but because the former are constantly present, and unattended by new and violent circumstances calculated to excite terror, no powers are provided for promptly and effectually dealing with them, the sums voted from the general local taxes for their relief having all reference, not to prevention, but to mitigation or cure. Partly by the extraordinary mortality produced by these ordinary epidemics, and partly by the extraordinary amount of emigration which for some time past has been going on, there is at present in operation a two-fold drain upon the adult life and working ability of the country, to some consequences of which we now beg to call earnest attention. The operation of excessive mortality caused by the frequent recurrence of ordinary epidemic diseases may be thus illustrated. Excessive mortality prevalent in any town or district is preceded by excessive sickness, there being numerous cases of sickness to one death. This wide-spread sickness, when not proving fatal in a few days or weeks, does so to a vast extent in the course of a few years, by producing slow disease in some vital organ, without leaving a single intervening day of real health or good working ability. Even when such sickness is not sufficiently acute to produce organic disease, it causes a state of depression which renders the sufferers infirm and feeble, and unfit for hard labour. The evils, moral, social, and political,