But the great fact that in the vital matter of the public health London was one great community, the various parts thereof being indissolubly welded together into one great whole, had not as yet apparently dawned upon the minds of the newly-created local authorities; nor, indeed, had Parliament even realised it, for it had left the forty and more of those authorities full freedom to scatter disease of the deadliest type from one end of London to the other, and to imperil the lives of London’s inhabitants.
The reports of one of the Medical Officers of Health give such an exceptionally complete and vivid description of the condition of the parish to which he had been appointed, and in which he worked, that a series of extracts from them are given.
The parish was the parish of St. George-the-Martyr in Southwark, on the south side of the river, just opposite the City; “low-lying and flat, and about half a foot below Trinity high-water mark,” with an area of 282 acres, and a population of about 52,000 persons, and the Medical Officer of Health was Dr. William Rendle, who speaks of himself as “an old parish surgeon.”
“If a loose drain conducts stenches into a man’s house instead of out of it, if the concentrated filthiness of a gully is blown into a front door or window, if a house often visited with fever has not been cleansed or whitewashed for many years, if there is no water but putrid water filled with disgusting living creatures, and no butt except a rotten one, not even the most enthusiastic lover of things as they are can find fault with us if we try to alter these things for the better….
“Let us picture to ourselves the man of the alley come home from work.
“The house is filthy, the look of it is dingy and repulsive, the air is close and depressing; he is thirsty: the water-butt, decayed and lined with disgusting green vegetation, stands open nigh a drain, and foul liquids which cannot run off are about it, tainting it with an unwholesome and unpleasant taste; the refuse heap with decaying vegetable matter is near, and the dilapidated privy and cesspool send up heavy, poisonous, and depressing gases. Such are the homes, may I say, of thousands in this parish?”
He contrasts the public-house with that, and says: “The surprise is not so much that one man here and there reels home drunk and a savage, as that for every such a one there are not twenty. Gentlemen of the Vestry who have seen these things can bear me witness that I do not exaggerate. This is no fancied statement….
“This parish has always been remarkable for its deathly pre-eminence. Hitherto there has been no sufficient law. After this we shall stand without excuse….
“… Who is to say, when the question is improvement, as to where we shall stop? No doubt there is a question of more or less rapid progress, so as to hurt existing interests as little as may be….
“Our intrusive visits, as some would call them, into filthy and diseased houses, benevolent as they are, on behalf of those who cannot always help themselves, have example even in the most remote times and from the highest authority. The ancient authority was more imperative, and made it more a matter of conscience. In the ancient Jewish law it was ordained ‘that he that owneth the house shall himself come and tell the Priest, saying: “It seemeth to me there is, as it were, a plague in the house.”’ The Priest was then to command the emptying it, so that “all in the house be not made unclean.” He was then to cause it to be scraped within and about, and finally he was to pronounce when the house was clean, and might be again inhabited.