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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
PAPERS RELATING TO
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water supply, and disinfection of privies is rendered in China unnecessary. All the advantages claimed for the dry earth system are gained here free of expense to the individual or public. The industrious and frugal habits of the Chinese, and even their very poverty, thus, work to their advantage (all sanitary measures more than repay their cost), for it compels them to utilize all excrementitious matter. Every particle of every kind of manure, besides rags, paper, &c., are collected and preserved with the greatest care. The private privies, which are all out of doors, are visited daily by these manure collectors, and so great is the demand for it, that no payment is made to these scavengers. Foreigners pay a trifle monthly to guarantee respectability, cleanliness, and regularity on the part of the collector. The healthiness of our foreign settlements in China is, in a great measure, owing to the absence of water-closets in the dwelling-houses, which in Europe are a fruitful source of disease. Gases, such as sulphuretted and carburetted hydrogen, are not so injurious to health when given off in the open air, as when escaping from sewers. China is par excellence, the country of bad smells, and yet, as we have seen, the people do not seem to suffer from them.
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"The removal of excreta and the disposal of sewer water is the sanitary problem of the day in Great Britain. There the sewers allow transference of gases and organic molecules from house to house and place to place; occasionally, by bursting, leakage, or absorption, the ground is contaminated, and the water supply is constantly in danger of being poisoned and contaminated, and all these dangers are greater from being concealed and being beyond individual control. Fevers and cholera are thus possibly propagated from house to house. In China we are entirely free from this danger."
99. With the best possible intentions, some of my medical and sanitary officers have, from time to time, been arguing against Dr. Dudgeon's views and the long-established practice of the Chinese community. Those officials advocate an underground network of drains and sewers in Hong Kong, and compelling the Chinese to build their houses and to modify their domestic arrangements in accordance with "the methods of western sanitary science." I have pointed out to them that the methods of western sanitary science of a few years ago, which they are so fond of quoting, are no longer considered infallible; and that some public health officers in England seem even disposed to take a lesson now from the experience of China, and to adopt views similar to those of Dr. Dudgeon. I have reminded them that the only fatal cases of typhoid fever that occurred in Hong Kong since my arrival have been in European-built houses with water-closets; and that the Chinese residents do not appear to suffer from typhoid fever or diphtheria.
100. In the tabular statements appended to the Colonial Surgeon's reports for 1877, 1878, and 1879, the total number of cases of typhoid fever amounts to eight, all being Europeans. Other forms of sickness arising from sewer gas, defective water-closets,