On the construction and management of human habitations, considered in relation to the public health / by Dr. Druitt.

  • Druitt, Robert, 1814-1883.
Date:
[1860]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the construction and management of human habitations, considered in relation to the public health / by Dr. Druitt. 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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    ON THE CONSTRUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN HABITATIONS, CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THE PUBLIC HEALTH. By Dr. Deuitt. Read at the Ordinary General Meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, February 20th, 1860. I pkopose to bring before you this evening some considerations on the manner in which human life is affected by the construction and management of dwellings. And I do so with the belief that the demolition and reconstruction of a large part of the buildings which occupy the surface of this great city, and the better management of the remainder, are the means through which we may hope to be delivered from some of our common domestic pestilences. Besides, it is evident that when the Legislature confided to your Institute the duty of examining into the professional acquirements of district surveyors, it placed in your hands, likewise, the power of exacting a knowledge of the conditions under which houses are healthy or the reverse; so that whilst, on the one hand, the public would be secured against accidents arising from insufficient solidity, it may also be secured against those slow, and silent, but a thousand times more destructive, accidents which arise from want of sunlight and fresh air. It is evident that your calling and mine meet at a certain line. I spend my life in the prevention and treatment of disease ; you are the constituted heads of the profession employed in the construction of houses. I shall not apologise, therefore, for endeavouring to present a sketch of the natural history of such diseases as may be presumed to arise from misconstruction or mismanagement of houses ; and I will not apologise for treating the question in its medical aspects ; any practical inferences will be best supplied by yourselves. Now, in seeking to display the facts of the case, it is evident how masked and complicated they often are, as they exist amongst ourselves, and how desirable it is to bring forward some experiments which shall show them in their simplest form. Such experiments are made whenever a body of men go and take possession of a country, and encamp in the open field, as in the common operations of warfare. Then certain consequences follow as a matter of certainty ; and there is no campaign of which we have any record, from that of the Greeks before Troy, to that of our own troops in the Eastern cam- paign, or that of the Spaniards now in Morocco in which we do not find distinct evidences of them. Let me, as a fair specimen, turn to the pages of Sir John Pringle, the historian of the medical events of the various campaigns in the reign of George II. ; and I choose him because it delights me to give an incidental mark of respect to one of the earliest and most honest observers of these matters, whose opinions, if acted up to, would have rendered Miss Nightingale’s labours unnecessary. Let us accompany 16,000 Bi’itish troops, who in June, 1742, disembarked in Flanders. Their first autumn and winter were not very eventful. They were quartered in various towns in Flanders, and it was noticed that those who had barracks in high and dry situations were healthy, whilst those in low and damp ones, where their shoes and belts rotted, were unhealthy. Their diseases were : various fevers and dysentery, which lasted through the autumn, but ceased with the first frosts of November ; and during the winter, colds, coughs, stitches, and rheumatisms. But there was one malady observed during this winter which attracted some attention; and this was a peculiarly malignant and fatal fever confined to the hospital, and seeming to have originated in the foul air of a ward, where lay a man with a mortified limb. So the winter passed; and in the spring the troops marched out, and on the 17th May, 1743, found themselves encamped in an open and healthy country, at Hoechst on the Main. x