The Sun.
London, England, 1857-10-07 00:00:00

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110

tenants of the rival company (whose supply between the
two epidemics had become worse instead of better) the
deaths, which in 1848-9 were 2,680, had in 1853-4 in.
creased to 3,476.* And when these numbers are made
proportionate to the populations or tenantries concerned
in the two periods respectively, it is found that the cho-
lera death-rates per 10,000 tenants of the companies were
about as follows :—For those who in 1848:9 drank the
worse water, 125 ; for their neighbours, who in the same
epidemic drank a water somewhat less impure, 118 ; for
those who in 1853.4 drank the worst water which bad
been supplied, 130 ; for those who in this epidemic drank
comparatively clean water, 37. The quality of water
which (as is illustrated in the first three of these num•
bets) has produced such fatal results in the metropolis_
causing two-thirds of the cholera deaths in those parts of
London which have most stvnely suffered from the
disease—has been river water polluted by town drain-
age ; but in other instances there is reason to believe •
that some of the most destructive outbreaks of cholera
which have occurred in particular groups of houses have
depended on the use of well-water into which impurities
had either been carelessly thrown, or had drained or
leaked through the adjoining soil.
"The General Board of Health would earnestly direct
the attention of local boards to these cases. They (with
many similar facts) support the conclusiont which, at
the close of the last epidemic, was adopted by the Media
cal Council of the General Board, to express the present
state of scientific knowledge as to the causes of cholera :
The doctrine of epidemic cholera which has gained
almost universal acceptance does not affect to explain
what may be that power—the exciting cause of the epi-
demic manifestation, which at intervals of time has
forayed from place to place about our globe, sometimes
vaguely spreading over a widened area, sometimes seem-
ing to move in more defined procession, and which now
for the third time has shed its fatal influence on our land.
But, with this mystery still unsolved, there has grown
more and more into shape a doctrine which is both
intelligible aid practical that the undiscovered
power, in its wanderings, acts after the manner
of a ferment ; that it therefore takes effect only amid
congenial circumstances, and that the stuff out of which
it brews poison must be Air or water abounding with or-
ganic impurity.'
" It is possible that no human efforts may suffice to
avert the course of that epidemic ferment which thus at
certain intervals of time, comes, as it were to test the
sufficiency of our sanitary defences. But public authori-
ties, armed with the existing powers of the law, can do
almost everything to render the mysterious influence in-
nocuous by removing those local conditions through
which alone it is enabled to destroy life in this climate.
"Local boards may be well assured that if any precau.:
tions adopted by them against cholera should hereafter

seem to have been superfluous in relation to that epidemic
—if the suggested possibility of a fourth visitation should
happily not now be realised—the pains and cost which
may have been given to sanitary improvement will in no
degree have been wasted, since undoubtedly such -exer-
tions will have borne fruit in preventing other diseaseand
in lessening both the misery and the expense, the waste
of life and the waste of money, which are now the conse-
quence of defective sauitary arrangements.
" W. Cowrza, President."