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The inspections of Berthels appear to have been left entirely to the Inspector of Brothel; men of limited education are certainly unable to perform the duties required of them without efficient superintendence and instruction, which has not apparently been the duty of any predecessor in the Colonial Surgeoncy of Hongkong, as the report will show.
The Inspectors have simply confined themselves to seeing that the laws laid down by the Contagious Diseases Act have been carried out, and in the way of sanitation, nothing has been done at all. I have found invariably in every house, the kitchen in a filthy condition, many without chimneys, the smoke of wood and charcoal fires distributing itself all over the house and rendering it difficult to breathe; the drainage more or less deficient, and where existing, in a most deplorable condition. Greasy soot lying thick on the walls and ceilings. Floors saturated with decaying animal matter washed off the dressers and thrown out of pots and left to drain how it can.
These floors being broken brick, boards, there were no proper receptacles for rubbish, which accumulated in corners or was heaped in broken baskets and only removed when it became of sufficient importance by taking up too much room and becoming inconvenient.
In the kitchens were generally found hutches used as privies, consisting of a few boards knocked together to form a rickety screen, and from age and neglect, were saturated with filth. No proper receptacle for night soil was found in the hutches; sometimes a broken pot, sometimes a leaky old tub, sometimes nothing at all. The night soil being deposited on the floors, and the urine draining away as best it might into the surrounding floor.
I can pretty well understand why people don't like to inspect these places; it acts on one in an unpleasant manner.
The girl's rooms next to the kitchens nearly all had ventilating openings into the kitchens. What benefit to the inhabitants of the rooms may be gathered from the foregoing paragraphs.
In at least a dozen instances, I found a girl's room separated from the privies by a boarded partition, through the interstices of which the stench from the privies percolated into the rooms.
As often as not, the privies were over the kitchens, or in a similar condition.
In all cases, without exception, the floors of the rooms and passages, the walls, and ceilings were in a filthy condition; so thick was the greasy dirt on the floors that it could be scraped off with the foot.
The houses were quite unfit for human habitation, let alone brothels.
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