Excerpt from Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health, 1866 Greece and Rome built aqueducts, gymnasia, baths and sewers, some of which still remain, and enacted laws relating to food, which were calculated to produce a hardy race of soldiers. The world fell back into barbarism, and all sanitary measures were neglected. The plague prevailed annually in Europe, and, as is supposed, carried off fully one third of the inhabitants. The great fire of London, in the year 1665, followed the great plague. It destroyed thirteen thousand houses and eighty churches, in four hundred streets. After this the city was rebuilt, with more roomy houses and broader streets, and the plague never returned again. The imperfect drainage still exposed the city to fevers and dysenteries, and from the former cause alone the annual mortality was between one and two thousand. The great fire was an impressive lesson as to the value of sanitary measures, and London, by gradual improvements, has become one of the largest and healthiest of cities, and has reduced its mortality from one in twenty to One in forty-five of its inhabitants. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.