For months together the topic almost monopolized the public prints. Day after day, week after week, the Times teemed with letters filled with complaint, prophetic of calamity or suggesting remedies. Here and there a more than commonly passionate appeal showed how intensely the evil was felt by those who were condemned to dwell on the Stygian banks. At home and abroad the state of the chief river was felt to be a national reproach. "India is in Revolt, and the Thames Stinks," were the two great facts coupled together by a distinguished foreign writer to mark the climax of a national humiliation. But more significant still of the magnitude of the nuisance was the fact that five million pounds in money were cheerfully voted by a heavily-taxed community to provide the means for its abatement. With the popular views as to the connection between epidemic disease and putrescent gases, this state of things naturally gave rise to the worst forebodings.
Members of Parliament and noble lords, dabblers in sanitary science, vied with professional sanitarians in predicting pestilence. If London should happily be spared the cholera, decimation by fever was at least a certainty. The occurrence of a case of malignant cholera in the person of a Thames waterman, early in the summer, was more than once cited to give point to these warnings, and as foreshadowing what was to come. Meanwhile the hot weather passed away; the returns of sickness and mortality were made up, and, strange to relate, the result showed not only a death rate below the average, but as the leading peculiarity of the season, a remarkable diminution in the prevalence of fever, diarrhœa and the other forms of disease commonly ascribed to putrid emanations."
While the historical stink of the Thames was without apparent effect on the public health, the nuisance caused was so great and the fear engendered was so real, that much good was the immediate result. One of the most lasting and far reaching benefits was the appointment by Parliament of a Rivers Pollution Commission, to study into and devise ways for the prevention of pollution of streams, lakes and water-sheds, from which public water supplies are obtained. In addition to this, the stink stimulated inquiry into the sources of infection in cases of epidemic diseases, and means for preventing the spread of disease, with such success, that as early as 1866 it was decided that cholera was a water-borne disease and that the cause of infection, whatever it was, could be destroyed by heat. This is evidenced by the signs the local sanitary authorities caused to be issued during the epidemic of Asiatic cholera in 1866:
Cholera Notice!
"The inhabitants of the district within which cholera is prevailing are earnestly advised not to drink any water which has not been boiled."
Following this, the Rivers Pollution Commission[8] of 1868 went on record as authority for the statement that "the existence of specific poison capable of producing cholera and typhoid fever is attested by evidence so abundant and strong as to be practically irresistible. These poisons are contained in the discharges from the bowels of persons suffering from these diseases." So it was that close observation and rigid inquiry discovered the truths that discharges from bowels of persons suffering from intestinal diseases contain the specific poison of the disease; that these discharges, mixed with the sewage of cities, often found their way into water supplies, and thus caused an epidemic of the same disease, and that boiling of water before drinking would destroy the infection, thus rendering it harmless. These truths stand to-day and the same means of prevention are resorted to in time of danger that were recommended during the epidemic of cholera in London in 1866. We know now, however, thanks to the investigations of Louis M. Pasteur, that all that class of disease which he designated as zymotic, are caused by little microscopic vegetation which gain lodgment in the body where they grow, multiply and thrive at the expense of the host; and knowing the specific cause of a disease makes it more easy to fight to prevent and to cure.
