On small pox and its prevention, including experiments upon the lower animals : and on the establishment of government hospitals for this and some other contagious diseases in the suburbs of London / by Edwards Crisp.

  • Edwards Crisp
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On small pox and its prevention, including experiments upon the lower animals : and on the establishment of government hospitals for this and some other contagious diseases in the suburbs of London / by Edwards Crisp. 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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    eyes and noses of the travellers, and dirty straw did not encircle their feet. Moreover, for three-pence a person could be put down in any quarter of Paris. The above description will apply to the present mode of travelling in Paris, as well as to that of 1829. At the latter period there was not an omnibus in London. But why are our vehicles so badly regulated ? Simply because Government takes no concern about the matter, so long as it gets the duty; like the sale of quack medicines, the money is the object; the public welfare is the secondary consideration. But what has this question to do with a Medical Journal, it will be asked ? We have introduced the subject, because we believe it is one that materially concerns the public health. It is nothing to us if people wish to be squeezed and wedged together like the oxen at Smithfield; this and other matters, we could name, do not come within our province, but if we can show that many persons lose their lives, by the bad arrangement of our public conveyances in London, our timewiU not have been unprofitably occupied. We need not inform medical readers that a certain number of people require a given quantity of pure air, for proper respiration, and that, according to the present size and ventila- - tion of the London omnibus, they cannot obtain this? That if a person predisposed to iUness breathe such an atmosphere, as he is frequently subjected to, in one of these carriages, he must soon be on a sick bed. That an individual, during the prevalence of cholera, or any other epidemic, when the tendency to disease, and the preservative powers of nature, are nicely balanced, need only get into an omnibus to turn the scale. If rheumatism should be his bane, he may obtain draughts without a doctor’s prescription; or he may inhale the vapours from bundles of dirty linen, reeking from the bed of contagion. “ Let us now tmm to another evil respecting the public health, that has been entirely overlooked. At the commencement of the present year, 1850, we attended a very beautiful woman, who fell a victim to that former scourge of the human race, SmaU-pox. A few days before the eruption appeared, she was on board a steam-boat at Southampton. The man who gave the cheques, had his sldn covered with SmaU-pox pustules. This lady believed she had taken the disease, before it appeared, and thought that it would prove fatal. But who can get into a hired vehicle of any kind in London, and feel sure that the
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