NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 607 



those remaining have "become less and less frequent and viru- 

 lent.* 



The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long 

 series of victories, and these may well be studied in Great Britain 

 and the United States. In the former, though there had been many 

 warnings from eminent physicians, and, above all, in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries, from men like Caius, Mead, and 

 Pringle, the result was far short of what might have been gained ; 

 and it was only in the year 1838 that a systematic sanitary effort 

 was begun in England by the public authorities. The state of 

 things at that time, though by comparison with the middle ages 

 happy, was, by comparison with what has since been gained, fear- 

 ful ; the death-rate among all classes was high, but among the 

 poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy -seven thousand paupers in 

 London during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen thousand were 

 suffering from fever, and of these nearly six thousand from ty- 

 phus. In many other parts of the British Islands the sanitary 

 condition was no better. A noble body of men grappled with the 

 problem, and in a few years one of these rose above his fellows 

 the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to his work was bitter, 

 and, though many churchmen aided him, the support given by 

 theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was very far short of what 

 it should have been. Too many of them were occupied in that 

 most costly of all processes, " the saving of souls " by the inculca- 

 tion of dogma. Yet some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of 

 the lesser clergy did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one 

 of them, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for 

 his struggle to make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry. 



Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of 

 the Board of Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal ; 

 but from one point or another, during forty years, he fought the 

 opposition, developed the new work, and one of the best exhibits 

 of its results is shown in his address before the Sanitary Confer- 

 ence at Brighton in 1888. From this and other perfectly trust- 

 worthy sources some idea may be gained of the triumph of the 

 scientific over the theological method of dealing with disease, 

 whether epidemic or sporadic. 



In the latter half of the seventeenth century the mortality of 

 London is estimated to have been not less than eighty per thou- 

 sand ; about the middle of this century it stood at tw^ty-four in 

 a thousand ; in 1889 it stood at less than eighteen in aHhousand ; 

 and in many parts the most recent statistics show that it has been 



* For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence among the Greeks, see 

 Grote's History of Greece, vi, 213. For a similar charge against the Jews in the middle 

 ages, see various histories already cited ; and for the great popular prejudice against water- 

 carriers at Paris in recent times, see the larger recent French histories. 



