Epidemics considered with relation to their common nature, and to climate and civilization : in two lectures delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, November 1855 / by Southwood Smith.

  • Smith, Southwood, 1788-1861.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epidemics considered with relation to their common nature, and to climate and civilization : in two lectures delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, November 1855 / by Southwood Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    WANT OF VEGETABLES. 38 weather black turbid rivulets which ultimately poured their contents into some water-course. The houses were mean and squalid, built of wood and wattles, thatched with straw, without chimnies, the windows without glass, the floors without boards, the furniture of the rudest description ; the use of linen was scarcely known; common straw formed the king’s bed. “ The floors,” says Erasmus, writing two centuries later, “ generally are made of nothing but loam, and are strewed with rushes, which being constantly put on fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, in some cases for twenty years j with fish bones, broken victuals, the dregs of tankards, and impregnated with other filth under- neath, from dogs and men.” Contemporary writers concur in representing the ofiensive odour of decaying straw and rushes as universal in the houses. There was no knowledge of the art of collecting, preserving, and storing fodder. The animals for winter food were slaugli- tered in autumn, and their flesh salted or smoked. It Avas only during three months of the year, from Midsummer to Michaelmas, that any fresh animal food, excepting game and river fish, was tasted even by the nobles of the land. The comm,on people subsisted chiefiy on salted beef, veal, and pork, the price of which was one half less than that of wheat in the time of Henry VIII. There Avere no fresh vegetables. As late as the 18th century salads were sent from Holland for the table of Queen Caroline. Sir John Pringle, writing in the middle of the last century, states that his father’s gardener told him that in the time of his grandfather cabbages Avere sold fora crown a-piece. It was not until toAvards the close of the 16th century (1585) that the potatoe was first brought to England, where it was limited to the garden for at least a century and a half after it had been planted by Sir Walter Ealeigh in his own garden. It was first cultivated as a field crop in Scotland so recently as the year 1752. For many centuries England remained in the condition of D