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  REPORTS
  RELATING TO
  THE SANITARY CONDITION
  OF THE
  CITY OF LONDON.

  BY
  JOHN SIMON, F.R.S.
  SURGEON TO ST. THOMAS’S HOSPITAL, AND
  OFFICER OF HEALTH TO THE CITY.

  LONDON:
  JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND.
  MDCCCLIV.


  LONDON:
  SAVILL AND EDWARDS, PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
  COVENT GARDEN.


  TO
  LOUIS MICHAEL SIMON,
  OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE, LONDON, AND OF
  THE PARAGON, BLACKHEATH,
  I DEDICATE THIS REPRINT OF MY REPORTS:
  LOOKING
  LESS TO WHAT LITTLE INTRINSIC MERIT THEY MAY HAVE,
  THAN TO THE YEARS OF ANXIOUS LABOUR THEY REPRESENT:
  DEEMING IT FIT TO ASSOCIATE
  MY FATHER’S NAME
  WITH A RECORD OF ENDEAVOURS TO DO MY DUTY:
  BECAUSE IN THIS HE HAS BEEN MY BEST EXAMPLE;
  AND
  BECAUSE I COUNT IT THE HAPPIEST INFLUENCE IN MY LOT,
  THAT, BOUND TO HIM BY EVERY TIE OF GRATEFUL AFFECTION,
  I HAVE LIKEWISE BEEN ABLE, FROM MY EARLIEST CHILDHOOD
  TILL NOW--THE EVENING OF HIS LIFE,
  TO REGARD HIM WITH UNQUALIFIED AND INCREASING RESPECT.




CONTENTS.


                                                            Page
  DEDICATION                                                 iii

  PREFACE                                                    vii

  FIRST ANNUAL REPORT                                          1

  FURTHER REMARKS ON WATER-SUPPLY                             72

  SECOND ANNUAL REPORT                                        77

  THIRD ANNUAL REPORT                                        177

  FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT                                       211

  FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT                                        213

  APPENDIX OF TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE SANITARY CONDITION OF
  THE CITY OF LONDON.                                        264

  REPORT ON CITY BURIAL-GROUNDS                              280

  REPORT ON EXTRAMURAL INTERMENTS                            285




PREFACE.


The following Reports, officially addressed to the Commissioners of
Sewers of the City of London, were originally printed only for the use
of the Corporation; and although, to my very great pleasure, they have
been extensively circulated through the medium of the daily press, there
has continued so frequent an application for separate copies that the
surplus-stock at Guildhall has long been exhausted. Under these
circumstances--believing the Reports may have some future interest, as
belonging to an important educational period in the matters to which
they refer, I have requested the Commission to allow their collective
reprint and publication; and this indulgence having been kindly accorded
me, I have gathered into the present volume all my Annual Reports,
together with a special Report suggesting arrangements for extramural
burial.

From the nature of the work, I have not considered myself at liberty to
make those extensive alterations of text which usually belong to a
second edition. I have restricted myself to a few verbal corrections,
and to rectifying or omitting some unimportant paragraph, here or there,
in case its matter has been more fully or more correctly stated in parts
of a subsequent Report. Frequently, where I have wished to explain or
qualify passages in the text, I have added foot-notes; but these are
distinguished as interpolations by the mark--J. S., 1854.

My Reports lay no claim to the merit of scientific discovery. Rather,
they deal with things already notorious to Science; and, in writing
them, my hopes have tended chiefly towards winning for such doctrines
more general and more practical reception. It has seemed to me no
unworthy object, that, confining myself often to almost indisputable
topics--to truths bordering on truism, I should labour to make trite
knowledge bear fruit in common application.

Nor in any degree do they profess to be cyclopædic in the subject of
Preventive Medicine; for it is but a small part of this science that
hitherto is recognised by the law; and that--so far as the metropolis is
concerned, scarcely beyond the confines of the City. It would have been
an idle sort of industry, to say much of places or of matters foreign to
the jurisdiction of those whom I officially addressed.

In re-publishing documents which proclaim extreme sanitary evils, as
affecting the City, I think it right to draw attention to the dates of
the several Reports, and to state that for the last five years many of
these evils have been undergoing progressive diminution, of late at a
rapid and increasing rate; while, at their worst, they represented only
what I fear must be considered the present average condition of our
urban population.

This national prevalence of sanitary neglect is a very grievous fact;
and though I pretend to no official concern in anything beyond the City
boundaries, I cannot forego the present opportunity of saying a few
words to bespeak for it the reader’s attention. I would beg any educated
person to consider what are the conditions in which alone animal life
can thrive; to learn, by personal inspection, how far these conditions
are realised for the masses of our population; and to form for himself a
conscientious judgment as to the need for great, if even almost
revolutionary, reforms. Let any such person devote an hour to visiting
some very poor neighbourhood in the metropolis, or in almost any of our
large towns. Let him breathe its air, taste its water, eat its bread.
Let him think of human life struggling there for years. Let him fancy
what it would be to himself to live there, in that beastly degradation
of stink, fed with such bread, drinking such water. Let him enter some
house there at hazard, and--heeding where he treads, follow the guidance
of his outraged nose, to the yard (if there be one) or the cellar. Let
him talk to the inmates: let him hear what is thought of the bone-boiler
next door, or the slaughter-house behind; what of the sewer-grating
before the door; what of the Irish basket-makers upstairs--twelve in a
room, who came in after the hopping, and got fever; what of the
artisan’s dead body, stretched on his widow’s one bed, beside her living
children.

Let him, if he have a heart for the duties of manhood and patriotism,
gravely reflect whether such sickening evils, as an hour’s inquiry will
have shown him, ought to be the habit of our labouring population:
whether the Legislature, which his voice helps to constitute, is doing
all that might be done to palliate these wrongs; whether it be not a
jarring discord in the civilisation we boast--a worse than pagan
savageness in the Christianity we profess, that such things continue, in
the midst of us, scandalously neglected; and that the interests of human
life, except against wilful violence, are almost uncared for by the law.

And let not the inquirer too easily admit what will be urged by less
earnest persons as their pretext for inaction--that such evils are
inalienable from poverty. Let him, in visiting those homes of our
labouring population, inquire into the actual rent paid for
them--dog-holes as they are; and studying the financial experience of
Model Dormitories and Model Lodgings, let him reckon what that rent can
purchase. He will