The Medical Officer of Health for St. Pancras wrote:—
“It has been shown that consumption and the so-called tubercular diseases are developed by want of pure air more than by any other cause.”
And not alone did the overcrowding lead to disease, but it rendered it difficult if not impossible to check disease.
“How is it possible,” wrote one of them, “to prevent the spread and fatality of fever and whooping-cough when six or seven persons are shut up in one small room breathing the same air loaded with zymotic poison over and over again?
“The danger of allowing a deadly atmosphere to be engendered by the crowding together of persons in a small room without sufficient ventilation is unfortunately not confined to the inmates of that particular room, but those diseases which are therein generated extend far beyond its immediate vicinity, and under some circumstances a large portion of a district will suffer in consequence.”[94]
Dr. Rendle, previously Medical Officer of Health for St. George-the-Martyr, in his evidence[95] before a Select Committee in 1866, said:—
“… The overcrowding exists to such an extent that the poor cannot by any possibility do other than breed disease, and when they breed it they give it to others.”
Lord Shaftesbury said:—
“As to the effects of all this overcrowding, can anything be more prejudicial to the human system than the filthy squalor, the fœtid air, and depressing influences of these dwellings?