The progress of death in Scotland and her counties since 1855 : a comparison.

  • Fyfe, Peter.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The progress of death in Scotland and her counties since 1855 : a comparison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    18/32
    Congress, Dr. Farquharson, is a distinguished member, liave the courage of their opinions, and Imve passed measures lately for Glasgow and Edinburgh, which enables these cities to guard their citizens in great degree from the consumption of beef and milk inoculated with the specific virus of tubercle. Last year, before the Congress of this Association in Perth, Professor Hay attacked, in a lucid and most valuable paper, the impure air of many of our schools, and showed clearly how many of our children are in all likelihood done to death in close and ill-ventilated class-rooms. Your President of last year. Dr. Cameron, M.P., referred at the end of his able address to the smoke-laden condition of the atmosphere of our towns as the prime factor in lung disease; and again and again the foetid air in the houses of the poor has been proved to be the destroyer of youthful life, and the cause of ultimate death in those who have passed into maturer years. But as yet we have no specific law as to the quality of a town’s atmosphere, and a very imperfect law as to the production of smoke. We have no law as to the quality of air which must be supplied to our school children, nor have we any power to compel adequate ventilation in humble dwellings, which may not be stopped by the injudicious application of a bundle of rags by the ignorant householder. Subsoil drainage in a damp and low lying town or village site is in no way compulsory, and consumptive nurses may still, without let or hindrance, tend our young children, and spread around them unconsciously one of the many mantles of the destroying angel. The law is silent on those vital concerns. Who is to blame ? Who, but the people themselves. They want teaching, they need warning, they require working up. Gentlemen, this is your duty. Upon you, as the sanitarians of Scotland, aided by the public press, lies, first of all, the responsibility. When that responsibility is faithfully discharged, and the people of our country awake to a full knowledge of the “indirect and clandestine influences of filth ” in its hydra-headed forms, we may rest assured our Government will, in the future as in the past, reach forth to us the helping hand.