With those other districts I have nothing to do; but I wish it to be understood, that in describing the City as healthy or unhealthy, I am not comparing it with Holborn, or Whitechapel, or Bermondsey, or other urban localities, where--whatever the relative badness of the places, the scale of comparison would be essentially vicious, and the results of comparison worthless. It is my object to test the salubrity of the City by comparison with a superior standard, in order that some definite aim may appear, towards which to direct the endeavours of sanitary improvement.
Starting, then, from our Registrars’ Returns, I invite you to inquire with me, how it has come to pass that within the City of London there have died in the last year twice as many persons as it seems necessary that there should die; and whence has arisen the apparent anomaly, that here--in the very focus of civilization, where the resources of curative medicine are greatest, and all the appliances of charitable relief most effectual, still, notwithstanding these advantages, there has passed away irrevocably during the year so undue a proportion of human life.
Let it not be imagined that the word _cholera_ is a sufficient answer to these questions, or that its mention can supersede the necessity for sanitary investigation. Let it, on the contrary, be observed that the epidemic which has visited us, extends its ravages only to localities previously and otherwise hostile to life; so that, while all regions of the globe in succession are shadowed by its dark transit, the healthiest districts of each region remain utterly unharmed in presence of the pestilence. Compare, for instance, the cholera mortality in a healthy suburban sub-district with that of an unhealthy urban one. Dulwich and the parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, in the City of London, are probably nearly equal in population: in the former, there was not a single death from cholera; in the latter, the deaths from this cause alone were at the rate of twenty-five to every thousand of the population. Dulwich is one of the healthiest sub-districts within the bills of mortality; St. Ann’s belongs to one of the unhealthiest sub-districts of the City of London; and the cholera visited each in proportion to its ordinary healthiness.