180
!
192 women submitted to examination under the Contagious Diseases Ordinance, and 9,683
examinations were made.
The average detention of the cases taken into Hospital was 14.7 days for all classes of venereal disease.
The number of men admitted into the Military Hospital was 164, as compared with 183 in 1879, of this number 13 contracted constitutional syphilis. All the cases were contracted in Hongkong.
The admissions to the Naval Hospital were 181, as compared with 293 in 1879, of these 23 contructed constitutional syphilis. Of the 181 admissions, 51 cases were not contracted in Hongkong, and of the 23 cases of constitutional syphilis, 11 were not contracted in Hongkong.
The admissions to the Government Civil Hospital were 107, of these 36 did not contract the disease in Hongkong, 47 of these admissions were from the Police Force. Of the Police 15 contracted constitutional syphilis, of the rest 28 contracted constitutional syphilis.
HEALTH OF THE COLONY.
The number of deaths this year among the European Community was 69 as compared with 55 in 1879, the percentage of deaths to the Population was 2.49 as compared with 1.98 in 1879. The average for the past nine years is 2.55.
The Rain-fall this year, 131.57 inches was the largest rainfall recorded in the past nine years. The maximum heat 95° has only once been equalled in the past nine years.
We have much to be thankful for in the heavy rains that have kept the drains of the Colony well flushed, and to that is attributable a slight decrease in a certain class of diseases which have been steadily on the increase during the past few years, as the following Tables show :---
Fevers.
Enteric,
Simple continued,.
Typhus..
Diarrhoea.
Deaths Among Chinese.
1873.
1874.
1875.
1870.
1877.
1878.
1879.
1880.
12
125
31
94
145
80
110
300
96
40
201
243
370
481
783
873
16
2
8
83
21
"}
195
231
283
959
311
201
008
848
ཚ་ྲཚུ
Deaths other than Chinese,
1878.
1874.
1875,
1876.
1877.
1878.
3879.
1880.
Enteric,
1
1
1
5
3
8
1
17
Simple continued,
6
4
5
8
16
21
10
Typlus.
.ខ
4
2
1
>>
77
J
Diarrhea.
17
17
18
14
10
9
14
10
Fevers.
These figures do not speak well for the sanitation of the Colony of late years, and the small improvement in the figures of last year I an convinced is only due to the tremendous flushing of the drains from the unusually heavy rains we had.
Table XVIII shows the work of the Sanitary Inspectors. The number of persons fined for nuisances was 191, the amount of fines collected $266.10, in 1873 the number of persons fined was 1,557, and the amount of fines collected $1,571.30. I do not see that the nuisances daily committed and filth to be seen in the roads and streets flung out from the houses has any way abated; far from it. I think things were never in so bad a condition as they are now since I have been here, and we appear in this matter to be getting worse and worse every year.
Six years ago I reported on the unhealthy and unwholesome style adopted in the construction of Chinese houses, but things have been growing steadily worse instead of better. Whereas in many cases narrow gullys affording some amount of air separated the old houses, now enormous blocks of houses three and four stories high are built back to back or with plain back walls with no apertures in them, and on the worst conceivable plans as regards sanitation. Since I wrote my Annual Report for 1874, in which I particularly brought to notice the construction of Chinese Houses, thousands of houses have been built or pulled down and rebuilt, and hundreds of others built on what were unoccupied places at that time. With only this difference that whereas the old houses were rarely more than two stories high, none are now built less than three and many four stories high and built on as bad if not worse plans than those they have succeeded. I have seen nearly all Queen's Road, a road about three miles long, change in the last seven years from houses two stories high to houses of three
stories. Owing to the gambling going on in Chinese house property, every available space is made use of and the sanitary condition of the town sacrificed to the greed for gain; land that five years ago could have been bought for $5,000 could not be purchased now for $50,000. This is all very well so long as the present condition of things lasts, but the first sign of an epidemic would be the signal for a clearance among the Chinese, and house property would then go a begging in Victoria, as it does to this day in the town of Port Louis Mauritius, once one of the most famous health resorts of the world. Hongkong once had the notoriety that going there was thought equivalent to going to certain death. I am much mistaken if she is not building up as bad a notoriety for herself in the future.
Constructed as the houses are at present, I do not see how they could be built on worse principles as regards sanitation. I have endeavoured to give the outlined plan of a Chinese house of three stories to help out the description I intend giving here.
The house consists of three large rooms, one on each story with a kitchen attached to cach room. These rooms are from 30 to 60 feet long by 10 feet wide and 14 feet high. The ventilation consists of two windows in front, & feet high by 3 feet wide, if there is a verandah in front, and they come down to the floor, if not, they are about 5 feet high by 3 feet wide, the entrance from the stair case and the door in the wall separating the room from the kitchen; these are all the means of ventilation, if we except in the case of the two upper floors, the interstices in the floors which open into the ronius below. The walls of these rooms are composed of bare brick, sometimes they are, when newly built, whitewashed, but rarely have any thing done to them after that. The floors are composed in the case of the ground floors of mud, tiles, or concrete, in the upper floors of thin deal boards so put together This sort of construction precludes washing or that there are considerable intervals between them.
These rooms say 30 feet by 16 cleaning for almost all floors, in fact nothing of the sort is ever done. are divided by thin plain deal board partitions 6 feet high into spaces of 7 feet square; a room of the above dimentions would divide into eight such spaces, with a small passage two feet wide running But this is not all: between down the centre. In each of these partitioned spaces a family resides. the top of these partitions and the ceiling is a space eight feet high, and in the poorer class of houses this would be considered an awful waste of room, another floor is therefore constructed inside the room and other partitions built on that. Thus a house three stories high originally, beconies by this proceeding equal to one six stories high. The staircases leading to these rooms are narrow with small steps and very steep, the incline being about one foot perpendicular to one foot horizontal. A European Policeman this year was killed by falling down a single flight of such stairs. The kitchen attached to each room is about 16 feet long, (the width of the house that is) by 8 feet wide and 14 feet high, the apertures for ventilation consist of the door into the room, an air hole 4 feet square in the ceiling; (in the case of the two lower stories opening into the kitchens above, in the case of the upper story on to the roof) and the chimney. It is not uncommon thing for children and even adults to fall through the air holes and break their necks. Down through these air holes come the down-spouts as they are The kitelien floors are called which convey away the drainings of the kitchens into the house drains. tiled and are always wet and sloppy. These down spouts are also used by all the inhabitants of the rooms as urinals, which are composed of lengths of porous earthenware piping cemented to the wall, the consequence is the wall of the house is damp with whatever filth goes down the pipes. It is not always that these down-spouts lead into a drain, sometimes only into the earth through which the fluids thrown down then trickles till it finds the water level. This is the construction of the houses; with such arrangements how are pure air, pure light, freedom from damp and an equable temperature to be obtained or pure water to be kept. The kitchen chimney owing to the want of draught is useless, the smoke of the fires when cooking is going on pervades the whole house, the walls are blackened all over the house by it, wood and charcoal are generally used, and the atmosphere inside the house at the times when the fires are going is little short of suffocating. The habits of the Chinese do not assist in the sanitation of the house. In each of the partitions referred to is a bed on which the family sleep, under the bed is a poo poo tub, which is of glazed earthenware with a cover to it, this is used for the night soil by the women and children, and is emptied according to the class inhabiting the house from once every two days to once a week. The bedding used by the Chinese is never washed, and among the lower classes they seldom wash themselves. Such are the conditious inside the houses often much worse than here described, and such the state of 96 out of every 100 houses in the Colony.
As for the roads and strects, Chinamen are to be seen pursuing their avocations on the paths and even in the roadway, throwing slops, animal and vegetable refuse out of their houses into the road at all hours, ruining the concrete roads, well laid granite side channels and foot paths by chopping wood, hammering and pounding things on them, thus cutting the roads into holes and loosening the stones of the foot paths and side channels, and costing the Government large sums annually for repairs. The drain traps are openly used by coolies as urinals, and the stench so caused is in some places abominable; mentioning places in principal thoroughfares, the traps near the gates of the Italian Convent, Caine Road, and those in Pottinger Street by the Roman Catholic Cathedral are among the most savoury. A more disgusting state of things than the Queen's Road presents between the Wellington Barracks and Morrison Hill is hardly to be described, the road always in a state of wet and filth from refuse, offal and slops thrown out of the houses. If this is so in the principal thoroughfare of Hongkong, what it must be in Tai-ping-shan where few Europeans go, it is not difficult to imagine.
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