“Men whose nervous systems became depressed, and the tone of their system generally lowered, became the subjects of a continued craving for stimulants.”[70]
Dr. Simon, Medical Officer of the General Board of Health, wrote:—
“In an atmosphere which forbids the breath to be drawn freely, which maintains habitual ill-health and depresses all the natural spring and buoyancy of life, who can wonder that frequent recourse is had to stimulants?”
The evils were disastrous enough for the adult population, but they fell with more dire effect upon infants and young children.
“Conditions more or less injurious to health gradually impair the matured energies and slowly undermine the fully developed constitution of the adult; but the self-same conditions, exerting their baneful influence on the infant or young child, nip the tender plant in the bud and speedily destroy its young life.”[71]
Throughout the whole of the metropolis the infantile mortality—that is, of children under five years of age—was very great: Almost without exception it was close upon, or over, 50 per cent. of all the deaths in the various parishes or districts.
In Clerkenwell the infantile mortality, which was “nearly one-half of all the deaths,” was characterised as “enormous”; but in Shoreditch it was actually one-half, being 50 per cent. (1858); in Bethnal Green it was over one-half, being 52 per cent. (1858); in St. George-in-the-East it was 53½ per cent.—or, to put it otherwise, of 1,351 deaths in the year, 720 were of children under five. In Poplar it was more than half. In Islington, in 1857, nearly half. In St. Saviour, Southwark, 50 per cent. in 1860–1, “a waste of life which appears almost incredible.”
In Limehouse (in 1857) of 1,403 deaths 690 were under five.
The Medical Officer of Health wrote:—