Another Liverpool incident is noteworthy:

“One morning a mate and one or two men, who had gone to bed the preceding evening in good health on a vessel lying in one of the Liverpool docks, were found suffering from cholera. The men were immediately removed to a hospital and the vessel ordered into the river; when another vessel, with a healthy crew took its situation in the dock: the next morning all the hands on board the second vessel fell sick of the cholera. Upon examining the dock in this part, a large sewer was found to empty itself immediately under the spot where these vessels had been placed[1525].”

One of the ablest accounts of the cholera of 1832 was that by Dr Gaulter, of Manchester. The deaths there were 706, and 216 in Salford; but it appeared surprising that, being so many and widely spread, they should not have been many more.

An inspection by the local Board of Health two months before the first case appeared “disclosed in the quarters of the poor—a name that might be almost taken [at that time] as a synonym with that of the working classes—such scenes of filth and crowding and dilapidation, such habits of intemperance and low sensuality, and in some districts such unmitigated want and wretchedness,” that the picture correctly drawn seemed to many a malicious libel. From that picture, “it was certainly to have been expected that nearly the whole mass of the working population would have been swept away by the disease.” There were few good sewers, and it would have required £300,000 to sewer Manchester thoroughly. As it was, the infection progressed slowly from the first case on 17th May until the end of July[1526]. It was the same in Salford, where it “crept about slowly for three or four weeks attacking solitary individuals or single families in streets and situations the most distant and unconnected, and then suddenly fixing itself in the lower and most populous part of the town.” It was in the end of July and beginning of August that the sharp outburst took place in Manchester also. An old soldier well known in the streets as a seller of matches, who “could take a pint of rum without winking,” died of cholera in Allen’s Court. His body was allowed to lie in the house two days and a half. In four houses of Allen’s Court, 17 cases occurred within forty-eight hours, of which 14 were fatal; this court was afterwards known as Cholera Court. In the same few days the infection was most deadly in Back Hart Street, “infamous as a nest of vagabonds and harlots,” and in a street behind it, in which nearly the whole of fourteen attacks ended fatally. Blakely Street, a bad fever locality in the time of Ferriar (supra, p. 150), had the most malignant kind of cholera in its lodging-houses. It was remarked that few of the factory hands took it: of 1520 employed in Birley and Kirk’s mill, only 4 were attacked during the epidemic; more women than men took cholera, and generally those that were employed about dwelling-houses were the victims[1527].

The whole cholera bill at Manchester was as follows:

Progress of the Epidemic.

Attacks
May 4
June 37
July 108
August 650
Sept. 261
Oct. 172
Nov. 33
Dec. 2
Jan. 2

Ages of the patients.

Attacks Deaths
1-15 199 101
15-25 153 53
25-35 264 98
35-45 192 93
45-55 197 116
55-65 120 85
65-80 85 68