Human Physiology. 



If there were any true science of medicine, undoubted and 

 infallible, in which all could agree, and which all might trust, 

 then physicians might be appointed like clergymen, and receive 

 proper salaries from the State; but while there are so many 

 medical sects, opposed in theory and practice, and doctors 

 proverbially disagree no such arrangement, which would make 

 public health the direct interest and glory of the physician, 

 seems practicable. The nearest approach we can have to it is 

 the appointment of qualified sanitary inspectors. 



If in any way doctors could be paid according to results, 

 their emoluments increasing with the health, and diminishing 

 with the diseases of the community, we might probably lower 

 the death-rate to its normal standard. On this point there is 

 one very striking illustration. Convicts were once transported 

 to the British Penal Colonies in private vessels by contract, at 

 so much a head for the number embarked. The ship-owners 

 were respectable men, the officers of the ships perhaps as good 

 as could be selected, but the mortality was frightful, amounting 

 to 50 and even 60 per cent, during the voyage. At length the 

 form of contract was altered. Instead of the ship-owners being 

 paid per head on the number embarked, they were only paid 

 per head on the number landed alive; so that the ship-owners 

 lost by every person who died on the passage. This form of 

 contract changed the whole face of things. Attention, or the 

 efficient stimulus of interest, was directed to the causes of the 

 mortality; ventilation and other appliances were sedulously 

 attended to; the merchant, at his own proper cost, provided 

 a medical officer to take charge of the convicts, and the remu- 

 neration of that officer was proportioned to the number landed 

 alive. The result was a mortality of only one and a-half per 

 cent. The forty-eight to sixty-eight in a hundred, or more 

 than half, were then, in the earlier voyages, simply murdered 

 not wilfully, but by selfish and criminal neglect. If the salaries 

 of municipal officers, the income of physicians, the pecuniary 



