A healthy year in London / [Charles Dickens].

  • Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.
Date:
[1857]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A healthy year in London / [Charles Dickens]. 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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    done, which suggests the strong conviction to ' which we have before referred, that even i already some part of the diminution in the ■ rate of our mortality is due to recent exer- j tion for the removal of a few causes of: disease—faint as it is in comparison with the great mass of evil to be overcome. In one parish alone (Whitechapel) thirteen hundred cesspools have been abolished, and ! nearly four hundred, for which sewerage could not be substituted, have been cleansed. In the same parish, more than three hun- dred dwellings have been lime-whited and cleaned; as many yards and cellars have been paved; improvement has been made in forty slaughter-houses; dust-bins have been built, water supply has been amended in some houses, and connected with soil-pans in seven hundred and fifty. This kind of activity, various in degree, is everywhere shown ; out of these reports we might fill two or three columns with such local records of work done. A large proportion of it is the result of the activity of the inspectors of nuisances. The business of the officer of health is to supply in each district the help- ing mind, and we have not read our heap of reports without acquiring a very high respect for the intelligence of the body of gentlemen by whom they have been furnished. They vary, of course, very much in ability, but they are all written in earnest. Except one or two instances of subservience to vestries, they take a liberal, high-minded tone ; are firm in pursuit of their object, but make few extra- vagant demands ; and if they now and then misread a fact into theory, they far more than compensate for the occasional error by the frequency and force of their warnings against generalisation from a few facts, or from many facts without taking incidental circumstances into consideration. Thus Dr. Druitt tells the inhabitants of Saint George’s, Hanover Square, that they must look beyond dry tables of mortality to see that half the parish is like a vast hotel, with shifting population. He learns from the bakers, that there is from twice and a-half to four times as much bread eaten there in June as in September. Many people, if sick, go into the country. Into certain streets, many sick people come as lodgers, attracted by the excellence of the medical and surgical advice to be had in the parish, so that, apart from that consideration, we might sup- pose, from tables, that those streets were particularly fatal to persons in the prime of life. Again, the immunity from sickness and death among the rich is made to appear greater than it is, because, in the population of their houses, are reckoned the domestic servants, who leave, if unhealthy, go away to their friends in the alleys to be ill ; and who, having given their lives to swell the life- table of the rich, add their deaths to the death-tables of the poor. The Medical Officers of Health in London, very soon after their appointment, formed themselves into an Association, in order that since their office was new, its duty ill-defined, and its usefulness very dependent upon their all collecting and arranging facts upon a common system, they might vfork har- moniously ‘‘for mutual assistance and infor- mation, and for the advancement of medical science.” The good spirit which produced such an association has maintained it now for fifteen months, not only as a bond of union among fellow-workers, but as a means of making work effective for the public service.; We have shown how the reports before us teach the need of sanitary work in London, and that they tell something of work done. It remains for us to refer to the curious facts and valuable suggestions in which they abound. As to particular diseases, there are strange things to be learnt. Why is consumption the disease most fatal at Mile-end, as Mr. Freeman shows us that it is ; and why has Dr. Buchanan to report that the great feeder of the grave is measle in Saint Giles’s ? The- last fact reminds us of a sentence in Mr. Wilkinson’s report for the Lewisham district. “ Closely surrounding a courtyard, in which, are placed a stable, slaughter-house, and dung- heap, draining into a well (which was, until lately, used for drinking) there have been sixteen or seventeen severe cases of measles.”’ In Mr. Pittard’s district of Saint George’s- in-the-East, there are the London Docks, and into these docks, clearly and easily preventible as the disease is, “hardly a i month passes without the coming of a ship I with frightful sickness and death on board I from scurvy.” In one case that came under i Mr. Pittard’s notice, the captain perfectly I well knew by what means to prevent scurvy,. I “ and, after the first culpable neglect in leav- I ing India without them—when scurvy was ; spreading in the ship, and one man had already died of it—they lay to at the Azores, where oranges (a well-known preventive) were selling at threepence the dozen, and the captain purchased some for his own use, of which he subsequently sold a few to the sick men at two-penCe a-piece. The outlay of a pound or two would have enabled him to put his crew in perfect health ; but he only took care of himself. Two more men died before the ship reached England, and the survivors contrasted with the captain, who was hale and hearty, it was painful to see. The law, as it now stands, I fear, cannot be brought directly to bear on such a case. I had no vent for my indignation, but to upbraid this captain, in no measured terms, on his own deck, in the presence of the men he had so foully v/ronged.” Among the suggestions scattered about these reports, are some for the establishment of public playgrounds ; some, tending to enforce the fact, that the pulling down of here and there a house, when to do so would make an open thoroughfare of a blind alley