66 
The diseases which, perhaps, seems to be most prevalent and 
most fatal, are chest complaints, which include consumption. 
It is highly probable that if this disease could be eradicated, 
all chest affections, by which I mean bronchitis, inflammation of 
lungs, &¢., would disappear ; also disease of glands and joints, 
and others. Consumption can be transmitted, and the bulk of 
the people affected by it have it transmitted in them. 
A healthy man can stand almost anything—alternate heat and 
cold, wet, frost, snow, a fair amount of hard work more than 
sufficient for his own wants, and still live on to seventy. 
To reduce it to figures. Suppose we take our healthy man as 
representing the numeral 100, and we say man breaks down 
at 50. Putting healthy man as 100 hard work may take 10, 
living in a poisonous atmosphere 20, starvation 20, and now he 
is reduced to his breaking down point, and if we take away any 
more he fails. 
An hereditary-diseased man would stand at 80 to begin with, 
if he lives under good sanitary conditions, &c., is not overworked, 
he can survive; but place him under the strain of the man 
represented by 100 he will fail sooner. 
Dr. Farr has shown that every child born in this country has 
a value to the State of £150, this value varying from his birth 
to extreme old age, when he is not capable of taking his 
part in the production. His greatest value is from 25 to 35, 
when the powers of life are at their best, so that I need hardly 
show to a commercial people the loss entailed by his illness. If 
he drops into a chronic invalid he becomes a charge on his 
brethren. 
After suggesting that if every child was born and lived under 
healthy conditions, workhouses and prisons would be superfluous, 
the lecturer affirmed that hospitals are in great part filled with 
the victims of hereditary disease, and with accidents resulting 
from the terrible hurry and bustle to live ourselves and support 
our fallen brethren, the number of whom must get larger in 
proportion to the severity of the competition. 
Referring to density of population as a cause of death, urban 
and rural death rate statistics were quoted showing how high the 
record stood in towns compared with that of the country. This 
overcrowding of the masses was a fruitful source of many evils, 
and it was contended that as density of population was sure to 
produce death, so long as large aggregations were allowed, society 
was responsible for the resultant evil—in fact, accessory to the 
death of its fellow-townsmen. 
