THE GROWTH OF HYGIENIC SCIENCE. 659 



any idea of the ravages that terrible disease produced. All long voy- 

 ages were imperiled by it, while the very existence of England de- 

 pended upon her fleet, which had frequently to return to port abso- 

 lutely crippled with scurvy, in some cases as many as ten thousand 

 men being landed from the Channel fleet helpless. Although so far 

 back as the seventeenth century the efficacy of fruits and fresh vege- 

 tables as preventives had been surmised if not actually noted, it is 

 really to the renowned Captain Cook that the credit is mainly due of 

 having established this important fact. That eminent navigator never 

 lost an opportunity of taking on board fruits and fresh vegetables 

 whenever he could, and the result was that he was able to bring home 

 from a lengthened voyage crews in almost perfect health and condi- 

 tion, a thing never before known. It took many years, however, to 

 impress this fact sufficiently upon the authorities, and it was not until 

 1796 that the medical officers of the navy (among whom was the re- 

 nowned Sir Gilbert Blane) obtained the regulation ordering lime-juice 

 to be supplied to our seamen. The effect was magical : scurvy lost its 

 terrors, and it may be that the supremacy of England at sea during 

 the Napoleonic wars was in part owing to the improved condition of 

 her seamen during that gigantic struggle. We have still a monument 

 of the extent of the disease in the immense naval hospital of Haslar, 

 the largest in this country, which was built of such dimensions mainly 

 to admit the extraordinary number of scurvy patients which were 

 being continually landed from our fleets. We have not yet got en- 

 tirely rid of this enemy, but I think we know now how to combat 

 it, in spite of heretical opinions which find expression from time 

 to time. 



The recognition of foul air as a factor in disease was certainly 

 begun in the last century, when the brilliant discoveries in pneumatic 

 chemistry made by Lavoisier, Cavendish, Priestley, Black, and Ruther- 

 ford threw such a flood of light upon a previously obscure subject, 

 and opened the whole immense vista of the boundless science of mod- 

 ern chemistry. It was only then that the physiology of respiration 

 could be even partially understood, and the changes recognized which 

 take place in the respired air from the lungs of man. The great dis- 

 aster of the " black hole " of Calcutta, and the terrible effects of the 

 jail-fever, investigated by Howard and others, pointed to foul air as 

 a main factor in the propagation of disease and death ; and this was 

 further corroborated by the observations made by military surgeons 

 that outbreaks of typhus (or putrid fever) were most rapidly arrested 

 when troops were encamped and scattered widely over the surface of 

 the ground. It was reserved for the later researches of Neil Arnott 

 and other hygienic observers of the present century to prove the still 

 more important fact that foul air is the main cause of the still more 

 general and fatal class of destructive lung-diseases, which in this and 

 in other lands cut off so many of the brightest and the best. 



