Part 3

It is not unlikely that some of the cases of cholera which spring up without any apparent connection with previous cases, may be communicated through articles of diet. It is the practice of the poor people, who gain a living by selling fruit and other articles in the streets, to keep their stock in the very crowded rooms in which they live, and, when visiting the out-patients of a medical charity a few years ago, I often saw baskets of fruit pushed under the beds of sick patients, in close proximity with the chamber utensils. I need hardly say that if cases of disease were propagated in this way, it would be quite impossible to trace them.

If the cholera had no other means of communication than those which we have been considering, it would be constrained to confine itself chiefly to the crowded dwellings of the poor, and would be continually liable to die out accidentally in a place, for want of the opportunity to reach fresh victims; but there is often a way open for it to extend itself more widely, and to reach the well-to-do classes of the community; I allude to the mixture of the cholera evacuations with the water used for drinking and culinary purposes, either by permeating the ground, and getting into wells, or by running along channels and sewers into the rivers from which entire towns are sometimes supplied with water.

In 1849 there were in Thomas Street, Horsleydown, two courts close together, consisting of a number of small houses or cottages, inhabited by poor people. The houses occupied one side of each court or alley—the south side of Trusscott’s Court, and the north side of the other, which was called Surrey Buildings, being placed back to back, with an intervening space, divided into small back areas, in which were situated the privies of both the courts, communicating with the same drain, and there was an open sewer which passed the further end of both courts. Now, in Surrey Buildings the cholera committed fearful devastation, whilst in the adjoining court there was but one fatal case, and another case that ended in recovery. In the former court, the slops of dirty water, poured down by the inhabitants into a channel in front of the houses, got into the well from which they obtained their water; this being the only difference that Mr. Grant, the Assistant-Surveyor for the Commissioners of Sewers, could find between the circumstances of the two courts, as he stated in a report that he made to the Commissioners. The well in question was supplied from the pipes of the Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks, and was covered in on a level with the adjoining ground; and the inhabitants obtained the water by a pump placed over the well. The channel mentioned above commenced close by the pump. Owing to something being out of order, the water had for some time occasionally burst out at the top of the well, and overflowed into the gutter or channel, afterwards flowing back again mixed with the impurities; and crevices were left in the ground or pavement, allowing part of the contents of the gutter to flow at all times into the well; and when it was afterwards emptied, a large quantity of black and highly offensive deposit was found.

The first case of cholera in this court occurred on July 20th, in a little girl, who had been labouring under diarrhœa for four days. This case ended favourably. On the 21st July, the next day, an elderly female was attacked with the disease, and was in a state of collapse at ten o’clock the same night. This patient partially recovered, but died of some consecutive affection on August 1. Mr. Vinen, of Tooley Street, who attended these cases, states that the evacuations were passed into the beds, and that the water in which the foul linen was washed would inevitably be emptied into the channel mentioned above. Mr. Russell, of Thornton Street, Horsleydown, who attended many of the subsequent cases in the court, and who, along with another medical gentleman, was the first to call the attention of the authorities to the state of the well, says that such water was invariably emptied there, and the people admit the circumstance. About a week after the above two cases commenced, a number of patients were taken ill nearly together: four on Saturday, July 28th, seven or eight on the 29th, and several on the day following. The deaths in the cases that were fatal took place as follows:—one on the 29th, four on the 30th, and one on the 31st July; two on August 1st, and one on August the 2nd, 5th, and 10th respectively, making eleven in all. They occurred in seven out of the fourteen small houses situated in the court.

The two first cases on the 20th and 21st were probably caused by the cholera evacuations contained in the Thames water, as it came from the waterworks, and they may be considered to represent about the average amount of cases for the neighbourhood, there having been just that number in the adjoining court, about the same time. But in a few days, when the dejections of these patients must have become mixed with the water the people drank, a number of additional cases commenced nearly together. The patients were all women and children, the men living in the court not having been attacked; they may have been out at work all day and not have drank the water, but as the surviving inhabitants nearly all left the place immediately after the above mortality occurred, I was not able to ascertain whether this was so or not.

In Albion Terrace, Wandsworth Road, there was an extraordinary mortality from cholera in 1849, which was the more striking as there were no other cases at the time in the immediate neighbourhood; the houses opposite to, behind, and in the same line, at each end of those in which the disease prevailed, having been free from it. The row of houses in which the cholera prevailed to an extent probably at that time quite unprecedented in this country, constituted the genteel suburban dwellings of a number of professional and tradespeople, and are most of them detached a few feet from each other. They were supplied with water on the same plan. In this instance the water got contaminated by the contents of the house-drains and cesspools. The cholera extended to nearly all the houses in which the water was thus tainted, and to no others.

[Sidenote: THE OUTBREAK OF CHOLERA AT ALBION TERRACE.]

These houses were numbered from 1 to 17, in Albion Terrace, and were supplied with water from a copious spring in the road in front of the terrace, the water of which was conducted, by a brick barrel-drain between Nos. 7 and 8, to the back of the houses, and then flowed right and left, to supply tanks in the ground behind each house, the tanks being made of brickwork and cement, covered with a flat stone, and connected with each other by stoneware pipes six inches in diameter. A leaden pipe conveyed water from each tank to a pump situated in the back kitchen. There was a cesspool behind each house, under the privy, and situated four feet from the water-tank. The ground was opened behind the houses No. 1 and No. 7, and the drains examined under the superintendence of Mr. Grant, the Assistant-Surveyor to the Commissioners of Sewers. The cesspools at both these places were quite full, and the overflow-drain from that at No. 1 choked up. At this house the respective levels of the cesspool and the water-tank were measured, and the top of the overflow-drain from the cesspool was found to be fifteen inches above the top of the tank, and the intervening ground was very wet. The overflow-drain mentioned above had no bottom, or one so soft that it could be penetrated with a stick; and it crossed, at right angles, above the earthenware pipe of the water-tank, the joints of which were leaky, and allowed the water to escape. Behind No. 7, Mr. Grant found a pipe for bringing surplus water from the tanks, communicating with a drain from the cesspool; and he found a flat brick drain laid over the barrel-drain before mentioned, which brought the water from the spring. It appears, from a plan of the property, that this drain, which was continued in a direction towards the sewer in Battersea Fields, brought surface-drainage from the road, and received the drains from the cesspools, the house-drains from the sinks in the back kitchens, and the surplus water, or some of it, from the tanks. There was every reason to believe that this drain was stopped up, but that was not ascertained: at all events it was unable to convey the water flowing into it during the storm on July 26th, as it burst near the house No. 8, and inundated the lower premises of that and the adjoining house, No. 9, with fœtid water; and it was from this time that the water, which had occasionally been complained of before, was found by most of the people in these seventeen houses to be more or less impure or disagreeable. The water broke out of the drain again at No. 8, and overflowed the kitchens, during a heavy rain on August 2nd. It should be particularly remarked, that the tanks were placed on the same level, so that pumping from one would draw water from the others, and that any impurity getting into one tank would consequently be imparted to the rest.

The first case of cholera occurred at No. 13, on July 28th (two days after the bursting of the drain), in a lady who had had premonitory symptoms for three or four days. It was fatal in fourteen hours. There was an accumulation of rubbish in the cellar of this house, which was said to be offensive by the person who removed it; but the proprietor of the house denied this. A lady at No. 8 was attacked with choleraic diarrhœa on July 30th: she recovered. On August 1st, a lady, aged eighty-one, at No. 6, who had had some diarrhœa eight or ten days before, which had yielded to her own treatment, was attacked with cholera: she died on the 4th with congested brain. Diarrhœa commenced on August 1st in a lady aged 60, at No. 3; collapse took place on the 5th, and death on the 6th. On August 3rd, there were three or four cases, in different parts of the row of houses, and two of them terminated fatally on the same day. The attacks were numerous during the following three or four days, and after that time they diminished in number. More than half the inhabitants of the part of the terrace in which the cholera prevailed, were attacked with it, and upwards of half the cases were fatal. The deaths occurred as follows; but as some of the patients lingered a few days, and died in the consecutive fever, the deaths are less closely grouped than the seizures. There was one death on July 28th, two on August 3rd, four on the 4th, two on the 6th, two on the 7th, four on the 8th, three on the 9th, one on the 11th, and one on the 13th. These make twenty fatal cases; and there were four or five deaths besides amongst those who were attacked after flying from the place.

The fatal cases were distributed over ten out of the seventeen houses; and Mr. Mimpriss of Wandsworth Road, who attended many of the cases, and to whose kindness I am indebted for several of these particulars, stated that cases occurred in the other seven houses, with the exception of one or two that were empty, or nearly so. There were five deaths in the house No. 6; and one of a gentleman the day after he left it, and went to Hampstead Heath. The entire household, consisting of seven individuals, had the cholera, and six of them died.

There is no data for showing how the disease was communicated to the first patient, at No. 13, on July 28th; but it was two or three days afterwards, when the evacuations from this patient must have entered the drains having a communication with the water supplied to all the houses, that other persons were attacked, and in two days more the disease prevailed to an alarming extent.

I had an opportunity of examining some of the water removed by Mr. Grant from the tanks behind the houses No. 1 and No. 7, and also some of the deposit which lay in the tanks to the depth of from six to nine inches. The water was offensive, and the deposit possessed the odour of privy soil very distinctly. I found in it various substances which had passed through the alimentary canal, having escaped digestion, as the stones and husks of currants and grapes, and portions of the thin epidermis of other fruits and vegetables.

Many of the patients attributed their illness to the water. This is here mentioned to show that they had drank of it, and at the same time found that it was impure. As explaining how persons might drink of such water before finding out its impurity, it may be stated that the grosser part of the material from drains and cesspools has a tendency, when mixed with water, to settle rapidly to the bottom. The only houses supplied with the same water, after passing the tanks in Albion Terrace, were four in Albion Street; but three of these had been empty for months, and the fourth was inhabited by a gentleman who always suspected the water, and would not drink it. There were two or three persons attacked with cholera amongst those who came to nurse the patients after the water was condemned, and who, consequently, did not drink it; but these persons were liable, in waiting on the patient, to get a small portion of the evacuations into the stomach in the way first pointed out; and there might be food in the houses, previously prepared with the tainted water. It is not here implied that every one of the cases in Albion Terrace was communicated by the water, but that far the greater portion of them were; that, in short, it was the circumstance of the cholera evacuations getting into the water, which caused the disease to spread so much beyond its ordinary extent.

[Sidenote: IRRUPTIONS OF CHOLERA IN ROTHERHITHE.]

The mortality in Albion Terrace was attributed by Dr. Milroy, in a published report to the General Board of Health, chiefly to three causes: first, to an open sewer in Battersea Fields, which is four hundred feet to the north of the terrace, and from which the inhabitants perceived a disagreeable odour when the wind was in certain directions; secondly, to a disagreeable odour from the sinks in the back kitchens of the houses, which was worse after the storm of July 26; and lastly, to the accumulation in the house No. 13, before alluded to. With respect to the open sewer, there are several streets and lines of houses as much exposed to any emanations there might be from it, as those in which the cholera prevailed; and yet they were quite free from the malady, as were also nineteen houses situated between the sewer and Albion Terrace. As regards the bad smells from the sinks in the kitchen, their existence is of such every day and almost universal prevalence, that they do not help to explain an irruption of cholera like that under consideration; indeed, offensive odours were created in thousands of houses in London by the same storm of rain on July 26th; and the two houses in which the offensive smell was greatest, viz. Nos. 8 and 9—those which were flooded with the contents of the drain—were less severely visited with cholera than the rest; the inhabitants having only had diarrhœa, or mild attacks of cholera. The accumulation in the house No. 13 could not affect the houses at a distance from it. It remains evident then, that the only special and peculiar cause connected with the great calamity which befel the inhabitants of these houses, was the state of the water, which was followed by the cholera in almost every house to which it extended, whilst all the surrounding houses were quite free from the disease. Indeed, the General Board of Health attributed the mortality at this place to the contamination of the water, in a manifesto which they published not long after Dr. Milroy’s report.[6]

Dr. Lloyd mentioned some instances of the effects of impure water at the South London Medical Society, on August 30th, 1849.[7] In Silver Street, Rotherhithe, there were eighty cases, and thirty-eight deaths, in the course of a fortnight early in July of that year, at a time when there was very little cholera in any other part of Rotherhithe. The contents of all the privies in this street ran into a drain which had once had a communication with the Thames; and the people got their supply of water from a well situated very near the end of the drain, with the contents of which the water got contaminated. Dr. Lloyd informed me that the fetid water from the drain could be seen dribbling through the side of the well, above the surface of the water. Amongst other sanitary measures recommended by Dr. Lloyd was the filling up of the well; and the cholera ceased in Silver Street as soon as the people gave over using the water. Another instance alluded to by Dr. Lloyd, was Charlotte Place, in Rotherhithe, consisting of seven houses, the inhabitants of which, excepting those of one house, obtained their water from a ditch communicating with the Thames, and receiving the contents of the privies of all the seven houses. In these houses there were twenty-five cases of cholera, and fourteen deaths; one of the houses had a pump railed off, to which the inhabitants of the other houses had no access, and there was but one case in that house.

The following instance, as well as some others of a similar kind, is related in the “Report of the General Board of Health on the Cholera of 1848 and 1849.”

“In Manchester, a sudden and violent outbreak of cholera occurred in Hope Street, Salford. The inhabitants used water from a particular pump-well. This well had been repaired, and a sewer which passes within nine inches of the edge of it became accidentally stopped up, and leaked into the well. The inhabitants of thirty houses used the water from this well; among them there occurred nineteen cases of diarrhœa, twenty-six cases of cholera, and twenty-five deaths. The inhabitants of sixty houses in the same immediate neighbourhood used other water; among these there occurred eleven cases of diarrhœa, but not a single case of cholera, nor one death. It is remarkable, that, in this instance, out of the twenty-six persons attacked with cholera, the whole perished except one.”—Page 62.

[Sidenote: THE OUTBREAK OF CHOLERA AT NEWBURN, ON THE TYNE.]

Dr. Thomas King Chambers informed me, that at Ilford, in Essex, in the summer of 1849, the cholera prevailed very severely in a row of houses a little way from the main part of the town. It had visited every house in the row but one. The refuse which overflowed from the privies and a pigsty could be seen running into the well over the surface of the ground, and the water was very fetid; yet it was used by the people in all the houses except that which had escaped cholera. That house was inhabited by a woman who took linen to wash, and she, finding that the water gave the linen an offensive smell, paid a person to fetch water for her from the pump in the town, and this water she used for culinary purposes, as well as for washing.

The following circumstance was related to me, at the time it occurred, by a gentleman well acquainted with all the particulars. The drainage from the cesspools found its way into the well attached to some houses at Locksbrook, near Bath, and the cholera making its appearance there in the autumn of 1849, became very fatal. The people complained of the water to the gentleman belonging to the property, who lived at Weston, in Bath, and he sent a surveyor, who reported that nothing was the matter. The tenants still complaining, the owner went himself, and on looking at the water and smelling it, he said that he could perceive nothing the matter with it. He was asked if he would taste it, and he drank a glass of it. This occurred on a Wednesday; he went home, was taken ill with the cholera, and died on the Saturday following, there being no cholera in his own neighbourhood at the time.

There is no spot in this country in which the cholera was more fatal during the epidemic of 1832 than the village of Newburn, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We are informed, in an excellent paper on the subject by Dr. David Craigie,[8] that exactly one-tenth of the population died. The number of the inhabitants was five hundred and fifty; of these, three hundred and twenty suffered from the epidemic, either in the form of diarrhœa or the more confirmed disease, and the deaths amounted to fifty-five. Being aware of this mortality, I wrote, about the beginning of the year 1849, to a friend in Newcastle—Dr. Embleton—to make inquiries respecting the water used at Newburn, and he kindly procured me some information from the Rev. John Reed, of Newburn Vicarage, which I received in February, as well as an answer from Mr. Davison, surgeon, of Newburn, to whom I had written in the meantime. I learnt from these communications that the people were supplied with water in 1832, as they still were, from three wells, two of which were very little used, and that the water in the third well was derived from the workings of an old coal-mine near the village. The water of this well, as I was informed, although generally good when first drawn, became putrid after being kept two days. It was considered that the evacuations of the people could not get into any of the wells; but the vicar thought that the water of a little brook which runs past the village, and falls into the Tyne immediately afterwards, might find its way into that well which is chiefly resorted to. Putrefaction, on being kept a day or two, is so much the character of water containing animal matter, that, after receiving confirmation of my views respecting the communication of cholera by water from many other places, I wrote to Mr. Davison again on the subject, and he kindly took a great deal of trouble to investigate the matter further. He informed me that the brook was principally formed by water which was constantly pumped from coal-pits in the neighbourhood. About half a mile before reaching Newburn it received the refuse of a small village, and between that village and Newburn it ran through a privy used by the workmen of a steel factory. In Newburn this brook received the contents of the open drains or gutters from the houses. The drain which conveyed water from a coal mine or drift not worked for a great number of years, to the well mentioned above, passed underneath the brook at one part of its course, and from that point ran alongside of the brook to the well,—a distance of about three hundred yards. Mr. Davison said that it was disputed whether there was any communication between the drain and the brook, but that it was highly probable that there might be; and that an occurrence which took place a few months previously seemed to prove that there was. Some gas-water from the steel manufactory mentioned above got by accident into the brook, and some of the people affirmed that the water in the well was strongly impregnated with it.