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“10. Do you think there is a direct connection between the water supplied to a town and the propagation of cholera? I believe that there is a very intimate connection between the use of impure water and the propagation of cholera; and the proper antidote to that is a free and unrestricted supply of pure water.”
In Calcutta the yearly death rates from cholera averaged nearly 4,000 from 1841 to 1870. When water-works were introduced the rate of deaths were:
1870 1,560 1872 1,068 1871 790 1873 1,134The famous Broad Street pump, in London, in 1848, killed 500 persons in a single week.
In 1866 many deaths occurred from the use of water from a famous pump in Brooklyn. All trouble was brought to an end when the health officers removed the handle.
Typhoid fever and diarrhea are universally traced to impure water, and numerous examples can be given that were directly due to this cause. The enterprising town of Rugby, on the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, furnished us with a case of this nature. In Millbank Prison, England, typhoid fever was especially fatal until the year 1854, when the supply was taken from an artesian well in Trafalgar Square, instead of the Thames; and immediately thereafter, and up to April, 1872, a period of eighteen years, there have been only three deaths from typhoid fever.