“… I know of no disease that can be made so preventable as this.”
The Medical Officer of Health for St. George-the-Martyr wrote:—
“No extravagance can be compared with that of sanitary neglect. Pounds are willingly paid for cure, where ha’pence would be grudged to prevent. Some diseases we can create, most we can propagate, and send on their errand of misery and destruction.”
In 1878 the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel again referred to the subject:—
“It may be asserted without fear of contradiction, that all money laid out for the improvement of the public health will secure an ample dividend….
“The alleviation of suffering and the prolongation of human life is the duty of every noble-minded man to endeavour to promote.
“It cannot be too frequently reiterated, too extensively known, that the rich not only pay a heavy pecuniary penalty, but often suffer a heavy affliction in themselves and families by neglecting to improve the sanitary condition of the houses and localities occupied by the poor. It is well known that defective sanitary arrangements in the poorer localities are the chief causes of disease among the poor, and when a contagious disease is once located it soon assumes an epidemic form and attacks, indiscriminately, all classes of the people.”
These views were sound and true, but the contingencies described always appeared remote, and arguments of more immediate and remunerative results were constantly present.
If the conduct of the Vestries and District Boards was reprehensible for not administering the existing laws for the improvement of the sanitary condition of the poorer classes, and if the consequences of their deliberate inaction were so fatal to the lives of countless thousands of the people and so disastrous to the well-being of the community, the conduct of the “owners” of the houses, for the manner in which they allowed their tenants to live, was still more so.
“I often wonder,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for St. George-the-Martyr (1874–5), “what many of the owners of property think man was created for except indeed that he should be housed in foul, wretched dwellings in order that money may be put in their purses, and so they may reap where they have not sown. A grim kind of harvest that will prove. Surely the owners have neither humanity nor justice on their side when they allow their houses to become hotbeds for the fostering and spreading of disease, moral and physical, and in which it is impossible either to maintain cleanliness, or support health, or practice morality. There are thousands of such houses….