202 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
So far as housing is concerned, in early days the English dwelt scattered 
through woods and marshes ; in medieval times they began to flock to 
the towns in which the sanitary conditions were bad; though regulations 
have existed even from Plantagenet days for the abatement of nuisances,°° 
e.g. the prohibition of the erection of pigsties in the streets of London. 
In the late medieval period there were narrow streets with overhanging 
upper stories so that light rarely entered the lower apartments.*! _ Indoors, 
even in the great houses, the floors were covered with rushes piled, accord- 
ing to Erasmus,*? the new on the old for twenty years without clearance : 
an excellent breeding-ground for vermin. Sanitation was perhaps a 
little, but not much, better by Stuart times; and, ‘ whatever sanitary 
gains may have accrued from the destruction of the City in the Fire, 
London in the late seventeenth century was an ill-conditioned place of 
residence, with hardly the rudiments of sewerage or water supply, and no 
systematic removal of refuse.’ ** In many years the burials outnumbered 
the baptisms and the town fed on the country. In Hanoverian times 
matters, if anything, deteriorated owing to the most unhygienic window 
tax; this, however, affected the country perhaps as much as the towns, 
for Howard *4 refers to ‘farmhouses where the labourers are lodged in 
rooms that have no light or fresh air ; which may be a cause of our peasants 
not having the ruddy complexions one used to see so common thirty years 
ago.’ During the industrial revolution the aggregation of houses and the 
pollution of the air greatly increased and produced their well-known evils, 
though the sanitation of the individual houses was, in some respects, no 
worse than before. London lost its evil pre-eminence in the matter of 
mortality which was transferred to the manufacturing towns of the north, 
in which diarrhcea attacked the infants, and fevers of all kinds their 
elders. Inthe late Victorian period conditions steadily improved, although 
in remoter districts matters change so slowly that some of the present-day 
crofters’ huts in the Outer Hebrides closely resemble the habitations of 
neolithic man.* 
The third factor, food and its assimilation, is more closely associated 
with the foregoing than is usually realised. Leonard Hill ** has shown 
that sedentary occupations in still warm atmospheres have the effect 
of lowering the general metabolism and of reducing the desire for food, 
thus producing a similar effect to actual privation and affecting even the 
well-paid worker. Acting through long periods during the growing time 
of life, such factors whenever they arise may stunt growth as well as 
predispose to illness. McCarrison *? has indicated that the adult worker 
and even more the adolescent, need, no less than the growing child, a 
supply of food rich in vitamines, and balanced in its organic and inorganic 
30 Memorials of London (H. T. Riley), p. 339, et seq. 
31 W. White, Phil. Trans., \xxii., p. 35. 
32 D, Hrasmi Epistolae, lib. xxii., epist. 12, London, 1642. 
33 John Simon, Hnglish Sanitary Institutions, p. 106. 
34 John Howard, State of the Prisons, p. 10. 
35 Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. Report on The Physical Welfare of Mothers 
and Children, vol. iii., Scotland. Plates XTII., XIV., and XV. 
36 J,. K. Hill, Medical Research Committee, Special Report Series, No. 32- 
37 Medical Research Committee, Special Report Series, No. 38; also B. Med. Jour., 
Feb. 21, 1920. 
