and especially of the working-people's districts, is in
the highest degree favourable to the development of consumption, the
hectic appearance of great numbers of persons sufficiently indicates. If
one roams the streets a little in the early morning, when the multitudes
are on their way to their work, one is amazed at the number of persons
who look wholly or half-consumptive. Even in Manchester the people have
not the same appearance; these pale, lank, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed
ghosts, whom one passes at every step, these languid, flabby faces,
incapable of the slightest energetic expression, I have seen in such
startling numbers only in London, though consumption carries off a horde
of victims annually in the factory towns of the North. In competition
with consumption stands typhus, to say nothing of scarlet fever, a
disease which brings most frightful devastation into the ranks of the
working-class. Typhus, that universally diffused affliction, is
attributed by the official report on the sanitary condition of the
working-class, directly to the bad state of the dwellings in the matters
of ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness. This report, compiled, it
must not be forgotten, by the leading physicians of England from the
testimony of other physicians, asserts that a single ill-ventilated
court, a single blind alley without drainage, is enough to engender
fever, and usually does engender it, especially if the inhabitants are
greatly crowded. This fever has the same character almost everywhere,
and develops in nearly every case into specific typhus. It is to be
found in the working-people's quarters of all great towns and cities, and
in single ill-built, ill-kept streets of smaller places, though it
naturally seeks out single victims in better districts also. In London
it has now prevailed for a considerable time; its extraordinary violence
in the year 1837 gave rise to the report already referred to. According
to the annual report of Dr. Southwood Smith on the London Fever Hospital,
the number of patients in 1843 was 1,462, or 418 more than in any
previous year. In the damp, dirty regions of the north, south, and east
districts of London, this disease raged with extraordinary violence. Many
of the patients were working-people from the country, who had endured the
severest privation while migrating, and, after their arrival, had slept
hungry and half-naked in the streets, and so fallen victims to the fever.
Th