[1]
[Sidenote: Health of carriages.]
The health of carriages, especially close carriages, is not of
sufficient universal importance to mention here, otherwise than
cursorily. Children, who are always the most delicate test of sanitary
conditions, generally cannot enter a close carriage without being sick--
and very lucky for them that it is so. A close carriage, with the
horse-hair cushions and linings always saturated with organic matter, if
to this be added the windows up, is one of the most unhealthy of human
receptacles. The idea of taking an _airing_ in it is something
preposterous. Dr. Angus Smith has shown that a crowded railway carriage,
which goes at the rate of 30 miles an hour, is as unwholesome as the
strong smell of a sewer, or as a back yard in one of the most unhealthy
courts off one of the most unhealthy streets in Manchester.
[2]
God lays down certain physical laws. Upon His carrying out such laws
depends our responsibility (that much abused word), for how could we
have any responsibility for actions, the results of which we could not
foresee--which would be the case if the carrying out of His laws were
not certain. Yet we seem to be continually expecting that He will work a
miracle--i.e., break His own laws expressly to relieve us of
responsibility.
[3]
[Sidenote: Servants rooms.]
I must say a word about servants' bed-rooms. From the way they are
built, but oftener from the way they are kept, and from no intelligent
inspection whatever being exercised over them, they are almost
invariably dens of foul air, and the "servants' health" suffers in an
"unaccountable" (?) way, even in the country. For I am by no means
speaking only of London houses, where too often servants are put to live
under the ground and over the roof. But in a country "_mansion_," which
was really a "mansion," (not after the fashion of advertisements,) I
have known three maids who slept in the same room ill of scarlet fever.
"How catching it is," was of course the remark. One look at the room,
one smell of the room, was quite enough. It was no longer
"unaccountable." The room was not a small one; it was up stairs, and it
had two large windows--but nearly every one of the neglects enumerated
above was there.
[4]
[Sidenote: Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats
and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another.]
Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do
now, as separate entities, which _must_ exist, like cats and dogs?
instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean
condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the
reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have
placed ourselves.
I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly
to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was
once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in
a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first
dog, (or a first pair of dogs,) and that small-pox would not begin
itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a
parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox
growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms, or in overcrowded
wards, where it could not by any possibility have been "caught," but
must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and
pass into one another. Now, dogs do not pass into cats.
I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever
grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more,
typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.
Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon
disease in this light?
For diseases, as all experiences hows,[Transcriber's note: Possibly typo
for "show"] are adjectives, not noun substantives.