Second and Third Wards: Typhus fever made its appearance in tenant-houses, and in two or three instances spread through all the families immediately exposed. At one place the disease attacked successively every member of the family immediately exposed, but was prevented from spreading further by free ventilation.
Fifth Ward: The slips, in consequence of receiving the sewerage of the district and surrounding parts of the city, are generally foul and the undoubted source of much sickness. Smallpox has prevailed more extensively than for many years back. Typhus and typhoid fevers have been prevalent over the whole district.
Eighth Ward: The prevailing diseases of the past season have been fevers of the typhus, typhoid, remittent and intermittent types, cholera infantum, scarlatina, dysentery, and diarrhoea, all confined to densely populated tenements. The typhus and typhoid fevers have been of a malignant type in two houses, twelve out of eighteen cases proving fatal.
Ninth Ward: The prevailing diseases during the past season have been typhoid fever, dysentery, diarrhoea, scarlet fever, measles, and a few cases of variola.
[Sidenote: Seeds of Disease Uncontrolled]
Sixth Ward: The seeds of disease exist everywhere, and although removable and susceptible of sanitary control, they are yet uncontrolled, and at any time may spring into activity and a terrific life, that shall only have the power and effect of death. Cholera, when it visits these shores again, will first break forth here, if proper sanitary measures be neglected. Typhus fever nests exist in all parts of the district; and it has been traced from these nests to every ward in the city, spreading the disease not only in the worst localities, but into the homes of the industrious, the wealthy, and the highest classes of society. This disease is now on the increase, and if proper sanitary measures are not adopted to remove the predisposing and the infecting causes, we may again have an epidemic of that scourge.
Fourteenth Ward: There have been attended in this district, during the last year, over 200 cases of typhoid and typhus fever by one dispensary physician; also, 70 cases of dysentery, and 50 cases of smallpox. There is one particular locality which has contributed to the spread and intensity of the fever contagion, viz.: the little street known as Jersey Street. It is always filthy, and the effluvia arising therefrom is extremely offensive. The privies are generally full nearly to overflowing, and the yards are also in a dirty condition, heaps of refuse matter being allowed to remain and to accumulate continually in many of them. There is no sewer in this little street, though the streets at each end are sewered.