“Several proprietors of noxious trades having omitted to adopt the best practicable means for preventing injury to health, in some cases legal proceedings were taken against them.”
The Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel declared there was no desire on his part to use the powers of the Act to the oppression of any individual or to insist upon the adoption of such arbitrary and stringent measures as shall drive wealthy manufacturers from the district. “All that is necessary to be insisted upon is that the business be so conducted that the health and comfort of the inhabitants shall not be injured.”
But whether it was from the unwillingness of the local authorities to prosecute, or the difficulties of enforcing the law, the nuisances continued to the great detriment of the health of the people.
And over and above this combination of nuisances, there was the abominable smell from the river. That still was an evil.
“Rotherhithe,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health, in July, 1858, “in common with all other metropolitan riverside parishes, has suffered considerable inconvenience during the last month from the stenches arising from the filthy state of the Thames water. Perhaps in the annals of mankind such a thing was never before known, as that the whole stream of a large river for a distance of seven or eight miles should be in a state of putrid fermentation. The cause is the hot weather acting upon the ninety millions of gallons of sewage which discharge themselves daily into the Thames. And by sewage must be understood not merely house and land drainage, but also drainage from bone-boilers, soap-boilers, chemical works, breweries, and gas factories—the last the most filthy of all…. It is quite impossible to calculate the consequences of such a moving mass of decomposition as the river at present offers to our senses.”
As one sums up all these disastrous influences, or rather, these evil powers, unceasing in their work, by night and by day—in the overcrowded dwelling and the street—with their victims unable to escape, one realises somewhat the conditions under which great masses of the people of London were living.
The result was a fearful mortality—an awful waste of human life.
“Death,” wrote one of the Medical Officers of Health, “finds easy victims in filthy habits, overcrowded rooms, impure air, and insufficient and ineffective water supply.”
The consequences were inevitable.
“Wherever there are crowded apartments, imperfect or no drainage, offensive cesspools, dung-heaps resting against houses or close to inhabited rooms—wherever ventilation is impeded by the narrowness of courts and alleys, and wherever the inhabitants living under these unfavourable circumstances lose their self-respect, pay no regard to personal cleanliness, and consider a state of filth and offensiveness as their natural lot—there we find zymotic diseases in full force and frequency. Those attacked do not simply recover or die. I shall not be exaggerating when I say that all recovering from these complaints are permanently injured.”[66]