Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery; Dialogue, Spoof

Subjects:

Sanitation, Public Health, Disease, Government

People mentioned:

Edwin Chadwick

    Presents an imaginary conversation between various diseases following news of the formation of a sanitary commission for the metropolis. Diseases resent this intrusion. Typhus, for example, describes the sanitary reformer Thomas S Smith as 'an ugly hand to deal with', while Cholera, who has been making 'miasma and gases' in his Fleet Ditch 'laboratory', suspected a change for the worse 'when they began to attack the precious principle of self-government'.