NA TURE 



\7uly i. 1877 



terated foods are beginning to have effect, and much good 

 is resulting. Nevertheless, even here the legal rule falls 

 short of completeness. The inspection of animal food 

 is as yet most unsystematic and imperfect. With all our 

 richness of means ready at command, we have not 

 approached that admirable system for the inspection of 

 animal foods which our Jewish brethren, through ages of 

 ignorance and oppression, have managed so efficiently to 

 carry out, and which has entirely saved them from many 

 of the great calamities of disease that have fallen on less 

 careful people. The complete inspection of animal 

 foods, including milk, is a clear piece of sanitary law 

 which, from day to day and hour to hour, must ultimately 

 be enforced. 



Imperfect as legislation may be in respect to supply of 

 pure water and food, it is advanced in these directions 

 when the steps it has taken for supplying pure air are 

 brought under observation. There is no practical legis- 

 lation of any kind on this requisite. The air of our 

 large towns is charged with smoke and impurity. The 

 air of our great factories is charged with dusts which 

 destroy life with the precision of a deadly aim. Dr. 

 Purdon, one of the certifying surgeons under the Factory 

 Acts, reports that in the flax-working factories under his 

 care the carders, who are all females, if they get a card- 

 ing-machine at eighteen years, generally die at thirty 

 years. Can any fact be more terrible than such a fact, 

 that a girl of eighteen should have to live by an occupa- 

 tion that will bring her existence to an end in fourteen 

 years, and to that end with ail the prolonged wasting, 

 sleeplessness, suffering, incident to the disease consump- 

 tion of the lungs. If it were the fate of these doomed 

 workers that at the close of fourteen years' work the 

 majority of them were taken forth and shot dead in an 

 instant, their fate were infinitely better than it is. The 

 heart of the nation would thus be roused, and the law in 

 all its majesty would be put in operation to arrest the 

 progress of the crime and to punish the offenders. Yet, 

 year after year as effective an offence goes on, and be- 

 cause the results of it is hidden in the sick-room there is 

 no arrest of its progress, no punishment for its commis- 

 sion. 



In the application of political science to preserva- 

 tion of health not one subject presses more earnestly 

 than the question of the supply of a pure atmosphere to 

 the millions of industrials of these islands. In an in- 

 quiry I recently undertook on this matter for the Society 

 of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, the facts that 

 came before me were as of a new world. You will find 

 a compact mass of these facts in the lectures I had the 

 honour to deliver before that learned society. Those 

 lectures contain a tithe only of the things seen. 1 am 

 quite sure that our leading politicians can have no ade- 

 quate conception of the mental and physical condition of 

 the great industrial classes, or of the need that exists for 

 reconciling those classes to their fate. These truths are 

 plain. 



The catechism has failed to satisfy them. Bad air 

 keeps up in them a depraved mental as well as physical 

 state. Their poverty and not their will consents to their 

 condition. In short, as a physician dealing with the 

 physiological and psychological phenomena belonging to 

 a class instead of an mdividual, — and this is all the differ- 

 ence there is between a politician and a physician, — my 

 diagnosis is that a serious organic state febrile, fitful, 

 fatal, exists in this part of the nation ; that it demands 

 the watchful consideration of all physicians. State and 

 ordinary ; and that the sooner the natural cure for it, 

 pure air, and plenty of it, is let in the better for every class 

 everywhere. 



All political troubles have a physiological cause. To 

 the Statesman not less than to the physician, physiology 

 is the only true source of knowledge. A society such as 

 ours, therefore, possessing as.it does professed physiologi- 



cal skill, may render most important service by tracing 

 out for the legislator the simplest scientific means for 

 removing with atmospheric impurities and by preparing for 

 that sanitary future when men universally shall breathe 

 purity even with their freedom. 



If any other incentive to action in this direction were 

 required it would be the further fact that all diseases, 

 mental and physical, national and individual, begotten of 

 an impure atmosphere, are transmitted on. The con- 

 sumption of body, the restlessness of mind are reproduced 

 and gain intensity of development with each generation 

 until practically they inaugurate a distinct racial type of 

 human imperfectedness. 



With this topic of legislating for pure air would come 

 in naturally the question of homes for the people and 

 the development of those recent acts which have been 

 passed to meet the necessity. These efforts of the world 

 political can scarcely be over-estimated ; but there is one 

 movement which stands before them and which has been 

 singularly overlooked. It is essential that the home of 

 the working man should in every case be cleared of the 

 details of daily work. So long as he is compelled to 

 work in the room in which he sleeps and takes his food, 

 so long his home must be an unhealthy centre, and too 

 often it will be the centre from which infected work 

 will pass out, bearing infection into the homes of the 

 wealthy. A modification of factory legislation by which 

 a free and properly regulated work-room should be within 

 the easy reach of every working man in every crowded 

 centre is a necessity which all sanitary labourers should 

 strive to get supplied. Our Institute has another urgent 

 task before it in the effort to enforce this necessity on 

 public attention. 



In the future of sanitary science one more amongst many 

 other reforms of a political character must needs claim im- 

 portant consideration. 1 refer to the political assistance that 

 must be given to all of us who are engaged in the labour of 

 quenching the drunkenness of our land. Our best sani- 

 tary efforts will fall far short of their deserts until this 

 object shall be achieved. Over the future of sanitary 

 science will be suspended a pall of sorrow until this 

 object shall be achieved. Does any one desire to know 

 how the mortality of the kingdom is modified by strong 

 drink, let him read the knowledge in the State record 

 book which tells that those who sell the destroyer die by 

 it at the rate of one hundred and thirty-eight to the hun- 

 dred of the whole population. Then, starting from this 

 signal fact, let him trace the influence of the destroyer 

 through all the courses of diseases which, under learnedly 

 obscure names, spring from it and kill from it in all 

 classes of society. Finally, let him reckon up the here- 

 ditary evils which are engendered by the same destroyer 

 and the influence of that on the course of disease, and 

 his lesson will be in some measure complete. 



I do not think this the occasion to discuss the value of 

 the different political sanitary measures that have been, 

 or are at this time, in the public mind for the repression 

 of the national evil now touched upon. Be it sufficient 

 for me to state two impressions only. Firstly, that every 

 day's experience of the question in various communities 

 where as a teacher of abstaining temperance I am wont 

 to labour, indicates tome that unless the State does come 

 to the aid of the teacher the battle against intemperance 

 must be indefinitely prolonged. Secondly, that it the 

 State, itsell doing nothing active in the way of repression, 

 would but determine to cease to legalise the cause of the 

 evil and to make revenue out of the transaction, the 

 labours of the temperance reformer would have the most 

 prosperous season of success presented to their view. 

 Hitherto this has not been considered as a sanitary ques- 

 tion. In the future no sanitary student will venture to 

 exclude it from his studies. 



The contemplation of the political sanitary future of 

 this kingdom offers many other topics, all of which I must 



