Defective drainage as a cause of disease / by John Markinson Fox.

  • Fox, John Markinson.
Date:
[between 1870 and 1879?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Defective drainage as a cause of disease / by John Markinson Fox. 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.

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    DEFECTIVE DRAINAGE AS A CAUSE OF DISEASE BY JOHN MAKINSON FOX, Medical Officer of Health, Mid-Cheshire. THE subject of my address to-night is not of my own selection. It has been assigned to me by the Committee of the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association. But I could not myself have chosen a subject of greater importance, for I know of nothing that has a more general, immediate, and practical relation- ship with public health than the state of drains, both public and private. At the same time it cannot be denied that very much has been written, spoken, and reported of late upon this subject; and I am unable to hold forth any expectation to the pubhc that I shall be competent to advance any new matter. But the importance of the old matter is so intimate and extensive, and at' the same time so little appreciated, that what is true, though not new, will well bear reiteration. In fact, in this department of knowledge it must yet be line upon line, and precept upon precept; here a httle, and there a little; or, as Abraham Lincoln used to say, we must be continually pegging away, until the public conscience is awakened, and the public mind generally informed, upon the vast social and economic issues involved in good or bad arrange- ments for the removal of refuse. Speaking in round numbers the preventable deaths occurring in England and Wales reach an annual sum of 170,000.* This is surely an immense total to be one of annual recurrence, and of * Dr. Richardson, in his recent work, Health and Life (Daldy, Isbister, and Co., page 172), gives 210,000 as the number of those who die annually in England and Wales from preventable diseases; but I wish to speak within the mark, both here and elsewhere, in referring to such matters of calculation in the present address.