Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/896 (page 5)
    about the matter, that we who set up as authorities are but as the blind leading the blind. This is but one of the forms of want of faith in those gifts and powers which God has given to man to know things, and by means of that knowledge to combat all these evils. A man that has faith believes that good is possible, that progress is possible, that duties do exist, and that to some extent we can perform them, that we can know what to do, and how to do it, and therefore the man of faith works. The man who has no faith doubts whether there is any good or not. If he is certain of anything, he is certain that those who pretend to know do not know. The consequence is, that the man without faith is idle and indifferent, and therefore what I am preaching is to give you faith; and these lectures ought to give you a reason- able faith in the possibility of action, and in the reality of our knowledge. It is proved by actual experience that external circumstances have a very great influence upon man's health. Under proper sanitary conditions the death rate ought to be no more than 12 or 13 per 1000, but in this town, which is a fairly healthy town, the annual death rate is somewhere about 21 or 22 per 1000. In Dublin, I am told that the death rate is 40. Half these lives, then, are simply sacrificed by imperfect, by bad, conditions of health. And when I say 40 out of every 1000 die, I ought, taking into consideration the greater number who die among the poorer classes, to say, for certain poor districts of the town, 50 or 60; so that three times more people die in certain parts of Dublin than might do under more favourable conditions. At Hampstead the death rate is only 13; and in New Zealand it is only about 12. Then, taking the case of children. In a certain part of London, where they are well cared for, they die at the rate of 8 per 1000, while in the poorer streets they die at the rate of 30 per 1000. In Geneva, in the sixteenth century, when little attention was paid to sanitary matters, the probability of life when a child was born was only five years. No child could count upon living more than five years; but in the eighteenth century, when a little more had been done, it rose to 27^ as the probability of life, and