Volume 2

Public health: a popular introduction to sanitary science : being a history of the prevalent and fatal diseases of the English population from the earliest times to the close of the war of the French revolution in 1815 / by William A. Guy.

  • Guy, William A. (William Augustus), 1810-1885.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Public health: a popular introduction to sanitary science : being a history of the prevalent and fatal diseases of the English population from the earliest times to the close of the war of the French revolution in 1815 / by William A. Guy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    47/144 (page 251)
    fare, I by no means undervalue those other foes of the fighting man which bad customs, bad management, bad plans, bad strategy, are constantly creating. We know how the sacrifice of utility to show has affected the soldiers’ clothing, how the unchecked greed of contractors has afflicted him with bad clothes and rotten food, how little account has been taken of the salubrity of the countries to which he has been sent, how little of the seasons and their requirements. He has had his feet galled and crippled, he has been choked with a rigid leather stock, his chest has been constricted, his shoulders weighted and galled with a heavy and ill-poised knap- sack ; he has been exposed to pinching cold in summer clothing, has been made to march under a tropical sun without protection for the head, and has had to face the dazzling snows, or hot-glaring sands, without any attempt to save his eyesight. How the soldier himself has carried with him, wher- ever he has gone, that gluttony and intemperance which form the standing disgrace of our whole population, all our military histories tell us; and I shall have occasion to allude to it once at least in a future lecture. Fortunately, the time has passed when the armies of England first bred disease abroad, through manifold neglect of all wholesome habits and appliances, and then imported it among our civil populations; and that time, too, when our armies and fleets, recruited largely from our prisons, carried with them the terrible jail-distemper, and the equally formidable and then unmitigated small-pox. I shall have more to say on this interesting topic in my last lecture. In the two that follow, I shall lay before you (to serve as standards of comparison, whereby to measure other wars, past and to come) the figures relat- ing to the destruction of human life during the long fierce struggle, by sea and land, that ended in 18x5.