In this district the registrar had returned 162 deaths from “cholera” in the year 1841, which must have been from an unusually severe type of cholera nostras or British cholera. A first case of Asiatic cholera occurred at Cardiff in a sailor on the 13th of May, 1849, a week after there was a case at Lower Merthyr, and a week after that another at Upper Merthyr. In the course of the summer the ravages of the disease were enormous in the hilly mining regions of the interior of Glamorgan and Monmouth, as well as severe in the seaports:
| Merthyr Tydvil | 1682 | |
| Cardiff | 396 | |
| Neath | 738 | |
| Swansea | 262 | |
| Abergavenny district | 438 | |
| Pontypool | 69 | |
| Newport | 246 |
The peculiar selection of the mining townships was well shown in the district of Abergavenny: of 378 deaths from cholera in the third quarter of 1849, only 9 occurred in Abergavenny town, while 157 were at the iron-works of Tredegar and 210 at those of Aberystruth, just as, in the winter preceding, the villages of the iron-works all round Kilmarnock had been ravaged by cholera while there was little of it in that town itself.
Another chief centre of cholera in 1849 was the port of Hull. Including the district of Sculcoates, it had the following enormous mortalities from cholera in four weeks of September: 398, 507, 524 and 171, the whole epidemic from July to the 18th of October producing 2534 deaths[1557]. Its neglect of scavenging became a classical instance of the favouring conditions of cholera. An open space at Witham called the “muckgarths,” from the refuse deposited upon it, was one of the worst centres, just as the town moor of Sunderland, used for the same purpose, had been in 1831[1558]. In the other ports, Liverpool, with West Derby, Bristol with Clifton, and Plymouth with East Stonehouse and Devonport, the infection was most severe (see Table), and was observed to choose the poorest streets, lanes and houses, where there had been most typhus for a year or two before[1559]. On the Tyne, the greatest centre on this occasion was not Newcastle, but Tynemouth. The city of Durham, which escaped the cholera of 1832, had a severe visitation. The chief inland centres, besides the mining districts of Staffordshire and Glamorgan, were Manchester and the cloth-making towns of Airedale,—Leeds, Hunslet, Bradford, Dewsbury, and some others in the West Riding. Most of the Lancashire towns occupied with the cotton industry again escaped with little cholera—Preston, Clitheroe, Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, Bolton, Blackburn, Ashton and Chorley. Wigan had nearly twenty times as many deaths as in 1832; on the other hand Sheffield had only a quarter of its former cholera mortality, while Nottingham and Norwich had this time very little. Birmingham, Leicester, Cheltenham, Hereford, Stafford, Ipswich, Cambridge and Colchester were again almost or altogether free from infection. The agricultural counties, notably the Eastern counties, escaped once more with few centres of infection, and these unimportant. Cumberland as a whole had fewer deaths than in 1832, while Cockermouth had more. Exeter, which was severely visited on the former occasion, escaped almost wholly, while Totnes and Tavistock, with the surrounding Dartmoor country and other towns in Devon, had epidemics of the first degree for their size. In England as a whole the cholera of 1849 was more severe relatively to the numbers living than that of 1832, its great centres having been the same, or of the same kind, on both occasions[1560].
The cholera of 1849 reproduced very closely the former characteristics. The attacks were often in the night, especially in persons who had supped heartily on the coarser kinds of savoury meat. With the same undoubted preference for the poorer and more filthy quarters of towns, the infection showed also a certain apparent caprice in fixing on some places and avoiding others.
Thus at Leeds it was most malignant in the locality of York Street and Marsh Lane (an old centre of plague and typhus), which had lately been drained at a cost of some thousands of pounds, “whilst in the adjoining district, which lies nearly level with the river, and will scarcely admit of any sewerage, I have not heard,” writes the registrar, “of a single case of cholera”—an experience similar to that of a low-lying district of Bristol in 1832. At Liverpool, where much had been undertaken for sanitation since the disastrous Irish fever of 1847-48, the cholera appeared to Dr Duncan, the medical officer of health, to attack sewered and unsewered streets impartially. Another singular thing, which used to be noticed in the plague and is observed in the malarial fevers of towns abroad, was the choice of one side of a street only: thus, at Rotherhithe, in a street where numerous deaths occurred, they were nearly all one side of the street, in houses occupied by respectable private families, only one house having been infected on the other side; at Bedford, two streets showed the same thing.
In London, the least elevated parishes on both sides of the Thames were again its chief seats. Dr Farr, the superintendent of statistics, deduced the law that the death-rate from cholera in London was inversely as the altitude of the parish, and he showed, by a somewhat rough grouping of the cholera deaths, that the law applied to all England[1561]. An empirical generality such as that may have some value; but it is the exceptions to it that show the inward meaning of the fact.
Merthyr Tydvil, which was the worst cholera-spot in England with the possible exception of Hull, was five hundred feet above the level of Cardiff, its seaport, where the death-rate was much lower. Neath, also, had much more cholera than Swansea. Newcastle-under-Lyme, situated near the source of the Trent, and the highest town in the course of that river, had a far more severe visitation of cholera than any other town upon it all the way to its mouth. At Tavistock among the Dartmoor hills, cholera “sat for many a week,” as Kingsley says, “amid the dull brown haze, and sunburnt bents and dried-up watercourses, of white dusty granite.” But the poorer and more populous part of Tavistock was a somewhat peculiarly shut-in basin, which was “very often involved in fog during the night.” The town had escaped cholera in 1832, but one of its physicians, writing in 1841, and recalling its dreadful plague of 1626, did not feel sure that it would escape if cholera came back[1562]. Again, one thinks of Salisbury as standing among high downs; but it had a wet subsoil, bad sewerage, and bad water supply, and in 1849 it had 200 deaths from cholera among all classes in two months[1563].
In the not very extensive outbreak at Sheffield, one of its chosen seats was an elevated district called the Park, inhabited by colliers. At Bedlington colliery, near Morpeth, the cholera deaths in November were in the miners’ houses on the hill side. The elevated, airy and clean village of Loanhead, near Edinburgh, had 46 deaths in its population of 1200, during a few weeks of midwinter. In Dundee, built upon a steep slope at the waterside, there were bad centres of cholera in the higher parts as well as in the lower.
The determining thing appears to have been not so much the elevation as the configuration of the ground; any basin, or cup, or shelving terrace, any natural collecting-ground of moisture and organic refuse in the soil, may become a seat of cholera, whether it be at the sea-level or several hundred feet above it, provided it have a sufficient number of human occupants and a mode of drainage inadequate to its peculiar needs. Such was the situation of Merthyr Tydvil, of Neath, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, of Tavistock, of some colliery villages, and of certain localities in towns such as Dundee. Such, of course, was also the situation of the London parishes next the river on the south and east, of Hull, of Plymouth, of Liverpool, and of other seaports on estuaries. Neither altitude nor configuration means anything for cholera unless the ground itself be full of rotting filth. In all England and Scotland the cholera chose, as if by an unerring instinct, those not very extensive mining parts of the counties of Stafford, Glamorgan, Durham, Lanark and Ayr, which had as many hundreds of inhabitants to the square mile, and as little provision for the safe disposal of their excrements, as those village communities of Lower Bengal in which the infection had become established since 1817 as if it were an annual product of the soil.