St. Marylebone : report by the Medical Officer of Health on the recent epidemic of typhoid or enteric fever.

  • Whitmore, John.
Date:
[1873]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: St. Marylebone : report by the Medical Officer of Health on the recent epidemic of typhoid or enteric fever. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    communicated to me by Dr. Murchison, which bring the estimated number of families in which the disease has occurred to about 90, and the number of persons attached to about 320. These figures exclude all doubtful cases, and are, I am satisfied, considerably less than the actual number. The largest number of these cases occurred in this parish and the smallest in the parish of Paddington. The incidents which have been detailed to me as connected with many of these cases are of the most interesting kind and tend to prove incontestibly that they owed their origin to the infected milk. The per centage of deaths that has resulted, I have not been able to arrive at, from the circumstance that many of the patients suffering from the disease were removed to hospitals out of the parish, and others had gone into the country in the interval between drinking the milk and the first symptoms of the attack; of most of these latter cases there is great difficulty in ascertaining the ter- mination ; at present, however, I know of about 20 deaths and of this number not more than five or six have occurred in this parish. One I have ascertained occurred in Wales, a second in France, a third in Kent, and others in various parts of the country. The first serious outbreak of the disease appears to have taken place on or about the third week in July, and continued, as can, I think, be satisfactorily shewn, until the 9th of August, or within four days of the suspension of the sale of the infected milk. It must be understood that this report takes cognizance only of those cases of fever which are supposed to have been produced by the milk supplied by the Dairy Keform Company ; others of course have occurred which had their origin in other causes, but these it does not concern me at the present time to notice. The sanitary precautions which I thought it desirable to carry out, with a view to check the spread of the epidemic, and provide for the health and safety of the inhabitants generally, were as follows :— 1. A frequent flushing and disinfection of the sewers in all those parts of the parish where cases of fever were known to exist. The dis- infectants used for this purpose were sulphate of iron and carbolic acid. The former had the effect of oxidizing, or, in other words, burning up the sewage, the latter, being a powerful antiseptic, arrested the progress of animal and vegetable decomposition. 2. The daily watering of the streets with a weak solution of carbolic acid. This was carried out in those streets where the fever prevailed, as well as in all the crowded and densely populated streets and courts in the parish. 3. The daily sprinkling of the gullies and air shafts in the parish with the carbolic powder. 4. The distribution of small packets of carbolic powder to poor families, the sanitary state of whose houses required the use ot a powerful antiseptic.