[406] Registration District containing a population of 72,707 on a mean between the census of 1871 and that of 1881. In 1891 the population was 146,812.
[407] F. W. Barry, M.D., in Rep. Med. Off. Loc. Gov. Board for 1882, p. 72. The contention of the inspector was that the water-supply had been tainted by enteric-fever evacuations from a case which began on 22 May in a cottage some half-mile distant from the reservoir but in communication with it through ditches and brooks. The area of the water-supply did not correspond with the area of the fever.
[408] The report for the Medical Department by F. W. Barry, M.D. (Enteric Fever in the Tees Valley, 1890-91, Parl. papers, Nov. 1893), is an elaborate argument to prove that the flooded state of the Tees was indeed the relevant antecedent, not as indexing the rise of the ground-water in the respective towns, but as dislodging and sweeping down the slops, sewage and dry refuse of the market town of Barnard Castle, in upper Teesdale, whereby the water taken in from the Tees two miles above Darlington to the tanks, filters and reservoirs of the Darlington Corporation, and of the Stockton and Middlesborough Water Board, was tainted in some unusual degree—a hypothesis the more remarkable that the refuse, such as it was, had been suspended or dissolved in an unusual volume of water, that little refuse could have collected between the first floods and the second, and that no cases of enteric fever were known in the upper valley of the Tees. This judicial deliverance has not been accepted by the authorities of Darlington, Stockton and Middlesborough, nor by the Royal Commission on Water Supply, before whom it was laid.
[409] Besides the epidemic at Worthing in 1893, which is still sub judice, the best known instance of typhoid following a certain water-supply is the explosion at Redhill and Caterham in Jan.-Feb. 1879, Rep. Med. Off. Loc. Gov. Board, for 1879, Parl. papers, 1880, p. 78. The first instance alleged of the distribution by milk was the Islington explosion in July-August 1870 (Ballard, Med. Times and Gaz. 1870, II. 611). It was soon followed by the Marylebone explosion in the summer of 1873 (Rep. Med. Off. L. G. B., N. S. II. 193); but such instances have become less common, while instances of scarlatina and diphtheria following a milk-supply have become more common.
[410] Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, May, 1795.
[411] Berkeley’s Querist, Q. 362.
[412] Radulphus de Diceto, Imag. Histor. Eng. Hist. Soc. ed. I. 350.
[413] “Topogr. Hiberniae” in Opera, Rolls ed. V. 67. This and the preceding reference had escaped the notice of Dr John O’Brien, in the historical introduction to his Observations on the Acute and Chronic Dysentery of Ireland. Dublin, 1822.
[414] Polychronicon, Rolls ed. I. 332-3.
[415] “Many of the English-Irish have by little and little been infected with the Irish filthinesse, and that in the very cities, excepting Dublin and some of the better sort in Waterford, where the English continually lodging in their houses, they more retain the English diet.” And again: “In like sort the degenerated citizens are somewhat infected with the Irish filthinesse, as well in lowsie beds, foule sheetes, and all linnen, as in many other particulars.... Touching the meere or wild Irish, it may truely be said of them, which was of old spoken of the Germans, namely, that they wander slovenly and naked, and lodge in the same house (if it may be called a house) with their beasts.” Fynes Moryson, Itinerary, Pt. IV. p. 180.