[On the immediate results of the operations of the Glasgow Improvements Trust].

  • Russell, James Burn, 1837-1904.
Date:
[1874]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [On the immediate results of the operations of the Glasgow Improvements Trust]. 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.

    1/22
    XVII.—On the Immediate Results of the Operations of the Glasgow Improvement Trust at last May Term, as Regards tlte Inhabi- tants Displaced, with Remarks on the Question of Preventing the Recurrence of the Evils which the Trust seeks to Remedy. By James B. Russell, M.D., Medical Officer of Health, Glasgow. [Read before the Sanitary Section of the Society, December 14, 1874.] The results which the Glasgow City Improvement Trust desires to attain by its proceedings are clearly set forth in the Preamble of the Act by which that Trust was constituted, in these terms :— “ Whereas various portions of the City of Glasgow are so built, and the buildings thereon are so densely inhabited as to be highly injurious to the moral and physical welfare of the inhabitants, and many of the thoroughfares are narrow, circuitous, and inconvenient, and it would be of public and local advantage if various houses and buildings were taken down, and those portions of the said City reconstituted, and new streets were constructed in and through various parts of said City,” <fec. The first part of this preamble is that with which this paper is chiefly concerned. The Trust obtained power to turn out the inha- bitants of certain buildings, with the intention of improving their “ moral and physical welfare,” in so far as it was injured by those buildings or houses. No one will expect a simple transference from one house to another to produce an effect which can be fully esti- mated, whether it be good or bad, at the very time of the transfer- ence. Moral and physical injury grows into the moral and physical constitution of the individual in the course of his life, and is cumu- lative in the constitution of successive generations of his descendants. A gutter-child from the Bridgegate is a very complicated production. More forces have contributed to the pitiable result than those which have operated within the short span of his own life, or even passed into his body from the parents who begot him. The evil which the