There was a story current in the city of Mosul, about the time that the
first edition of “The Hundred and One Nights” began to be popular in
Oriental society, of a certain Prince who was taken ill of the plague.
Though his retinue was large, he was the only person who was in imminent
danger. The Court physician was also at death’s door, and a strange
doctor was sent for, who pronounced the Great Man to be in a fearful
state of debility, but retired without prescribing. The Prince waited
long and anxiously for remedies, but in vain. He clapped his hands to
summon a slave. “Where,” he exclaimed, “is the physic?”
“Sun of the Earth,” exclaimed the Nubian, “it is all taken!”
“And who has dared to swallow the medicine designed for the anointed of
Allah?”
“As it is written by the Prophet,” returned Hassan, “‘when the sheik
sickens, his slaves droop.’ Thy whole household was sick, and clamoured
for medicine; and, lo, the man of drugs straightway drenched them
therewith, ordering us all, on pain of the Prophet’s curse, not to give
thee so much as a single grain of rhubarb.”
“Breath of Mahomet,” ejaculated his Mightiness; “am I then to die, and
are my slaves to live?”
When a Mussulman is puzzled what to say, he invariably exclaims, “Allah
is merciful;” which was Hassan’s consolation.
“Let the wretched mediciner appear!” commanded the Prince.
The doctor came. “Illustrious father of a hundred generations!” said the
general practitioner, “thine own physician only could cure thee, and he
lies on his pallet a helpless being. _I_ may not so much as look at thy
transcendant tongue, or feel thine omnipotent pulse.”
“Wherefore? O licenciate of the Destroyer!”
“Inasmuch as I may not infringe the _vested rights_ of thine own special
and appointed physician. The law—even that of the Medes and Persians,
which never altereth—forbids me. Thy slaves I _may_ heal, seeing that no
vested rights in them exist; but——”
Here the Prince interrupted the speaker with a hollow groan, and sank on
his pillow in despair.
The Arabic manuscript, from which this affecting incident was
translated, ends with these words—“and the Prince died.”
This story is evidently a foreshadowing of what has recently happened in
reference to the metropolis of this country and the Public Health Act.
London was _in extremis_ from the effects of density of population,
filth, bad air, bad water, the window-tax, and deficient drainage. It
called in certain sanitary doctors—the regular consulting body, namely,
the Government, being too weak to afford the slightest assistance. The
result was, that a prescription, in the form of the Public Health Act,
was concocted,—but was made applicable to every other member of the
great retinue of towns, _except_ to the Imperial City; which was
exempted in consequence of the existing Vested Rights in crowded houses,
deadly stenches, putrid water, foggy courts, and cesspools. “Although,”
in the words of a resolution, passed at the meeting which formed the
Metropolitan Sanitary Association, “the strenuous efforts made in the
metropolitan districts to procure a sanitary enactment mainly
contributed to the passing of the Public Health Act; yet these districts
were the only parts excluded from the benefits of that enactment. This
exclusion has led to much misery and a great sacrifice of life.”
This exception was so monstrous, that even the Corporation of the City
of London took powers under their own Sewers’ Act for the preservation
of the health of the people dwelling within the City boundary,—who
number no more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand out of the two
millions of us who are congregated in civic and suburban London. The
remaining one million eight hundred thousand are left to be stifled or
diseased at the good pleasure of Vested Interests. Indeed, it is
ascertained that a quarter of a million of individuals absolutely _do_
die every year from the want of such a sanitary police as the Public
Health Act, amended by some few additional powers, would establish. What
number of persons are really sent out of the world from preventable
causes. It is also true that those causes can be efficiently removed for
about a halfpenny per head a week; or threepence per week per house; or
about eight times less than those who die unnecessarily cost the public
in hospitals, poor’s rates, and burial. In the “Journal of Public
Health” for November, 1848, and August, 1849, it is shown by elaborate
tables, that the direct cost of, and estimated money loss through,
typhus fever alone in the metropolis, amounted during the four years,
1843–1847, to one million three hundred and twenty-eight thousand
pounds, or two hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred pounds
annually. This sum is exclusive of the amounts contributed for the
purchase and maintenance of fever hospitals. For 1848, when the
mortality from typhus had increased to three thousand five hundred and
sixty-nine, the direct cost and money loss was estimated at four hundred
and forty thousand pounds.
This cold-blooded way of putting the really appalling state of the case
is, alas! the only successful mode of appealing to that hard-headed,
though sometimes soft-hearted, periphrasis, John Bull, when he is under
no special exciting cause of dread. His heart is only reached through
his pocket, except when put in a state of alarm. Cry “Cholera!” or any
other frightful conjuration, and he bestirs himself. To cholera we owe
the few sanitary measures now in force; but which were passed by the
House—as a coward may seem courageous—in its agonies of fright. The
moment, however, Cholera bulletins ceased to be issued, John buttoned up
his pockets tighter than ever, and Parliament was dumb regarding public
health, except to undo one or two good things it had done. The inflated
promises of the legislature collapsed into thin air, on the very day the
danger was withdrawn. It was the legend over again of the nameless
gentleman who, when he was sick, swore he would turn a monk; but when he
got well “the devil a monk was he.” Ever since, sanitary legislation has
been as much a dead letter in the Metropolis, as if the deadly condition
of some of its districts had never been whispered between the wind and
the nobility of Westminster, in Parliament assembled.
It has no effect upon unreasoning John Bull to tell him that, on an
average, cholera does not devour a tithe of the victims which fever,
consumption, and other preventible diseases make away with. Cholera
comes upon him like an ogre, eating its victims all at once, and he
quakes with terror; the daily, deadly destruction of human beings by
“every-day” diseases, he takes no heed of. Take him, however, a slate
and pencil; count costs to him; show that cholera costs so much; that
ordinary, contagious, but preventible diseases, cost so much more; and
that prevention is so many hundred per cent. cheaper than the cheapest
cures, he begins to be amenable to reason. Nothing but pocket
arithmetic, terror, or melo-dramatic appeals to his soft-hearted
sympathy, moves John Bull.
In order to supply the best of these exercitations by the accumulation
of carefully sifted, and well authenticated facts, and sound reasonings;
the results of scientific investigations, and of a large range of
pathological statistics, the Metropolitan Sanitary Association has been
for some months—like another “Ole Joe”—knocking at the door of Old John.
Whether the heavy old gentleman will soon open it to conviction and
improvement depends, we think, very much upon the energy and liberality
with which that society is supported and seconded by the public; for
whose sole benefit it was called into existence. To the exertions of
many of its leading members, if not to the collective body itself, John
Bull has responded, by admitting into his premises the Extra-Mural
Interment Bill, and we think he is just now holding his door a-jar to
catch the Water Supply Bill, which it is hoped he will admit, and pass
through That House next session. Meantime we, in common with the
association aforesaid, beg his attention to a few other points of
improvement:—
The adage “as free as air,” has become obsolete by Act of Parliament.
Neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the
window-tax. We are obliged to pay for what nature supplies lavishly to
all, at so much per window per year; and the poor who cannot afford the
expense, are stinted in two of the most urgent necessities of life. The
effects produced by a deprivation of them are not immediate, and are
therefore unheeded. When a poor man or woman in a dark, close, smoky
house is laid up with scrofula, consumption, water in the head, wasting,
or a complication of epidemic diseases, nobody thinks of attributing the
illness to the right cause;—which may be a want of light and air. If he
or she were struck down by a flash of lightning, there would be an
immediate outcry against the authorities, whoever they may be, for not
providing proper lightning conductors; but because the poison—generated
by the absence of light and air—is not seen at work, the victim dies
unheeded, and the window-tax, which shuts out the remedies, is continued
without a murmur. In illustration of these facts, we may quote a little
information respecting the tadpole, an humble animal, which—if the
author of “Vestiges of Creation” be any authority and the theory of
development be more than a childish dream—was the progenitor of man
himself. The passage is from the report of the half-fledged Health of
Towns’ Commission:—
“If the young of some of the lower tribes of creatures are supplied with
their proper food, and if all the other conditions necessary for their
nourishment are maintained, while at the same time light is wholly
excluded from them, their development is stopped; they no longer undergo
the metamorphosis through which they pass from imperfect into perfect
beings; the tadpole, for example, is unable to change its
water-breathing apparatus, fitted for its first stage of existence, into
the air-breathing apparatus, with the rudiment of which it is furnished,
and which is intended to adapt it for a higher life, namely, for
respiration in air. In this imperfect state it continues to live; it
even attains an enormous bulk, for such a creature in its state of
transition, but it is unable to pass out of its transitional state; it
remains permanently an imperfect being, and is doomed to pass a
perpetual life in water, instead of attaining maturity and passing its
mature life in air.”
It may give some support to the theory of tadpole development above
mentioned, to add, that the same cause produces the very same effects
upon human beings; upon human mothers, and upon human children. Human
mothers living in dark cellars produce an unusual proportion of
defective children. Go into the narrow streets, and the dark lanes,
courts, and alleys of our splendid cities, there you will see an unusual
number of deformed people, men, women, and children, but particularly
children. In some cells under the fortifications of Lisle, a number of
poor people took up their abode; the proportion of defective infants
produced by them became so great, that it was deemed necessary to issue
an order commanding these cells to be shut up. The window duties
multiply cells like those of the fortifications of Lisle, in London, in
Liverpool, in Manchester, in Bristol, and in every city and town in
England by hundreds and by thousands, and with the same result; but the
cells here are not shut up, nor is the cause that produces them removed.
Even in cases in which the absence of light is not so complete as to
produce a result thus definite and striking, the effects of the
privation are still abundantly manifest in the pale and sickly
complexion, and the enfeebled and stunted frame; nor can it be
otherwise, since, from the essential constitution of organised beings,
light is as necessary to the development of the animal as it is to the
growth of the plant. The diseases the want of it produces are of long
continuance, and waste the means of life before death results; they may
therefore be characterised as pauperising diseases. As to death itself,
it has been calculated that nearly ten thousand persons perish annually
in London alone from diseases solely produced by an impeded circulation
of air and admission of light.
This prodigal waste of health, strength, and of life itself, falls much
more heavily on the poor, than the mere fiscal burden, imposed by the
tax, falls on the richer classes. Inasmuch, then, as health is the
capital of the working man, whatever be the necessities of the state,
_nothing_ can justify a tax affecting the health of the people, and
especially the health of the labouring community, whose bodily strength
constitutes their wealth, and oftentimes their only possession. In
conclusion we may say, without wishing to libel any respectable Act of
Parliament, that the Window-Tax kills countless human beings in tens of
thousands every year.
The next improvement which must speedily be pushed under John Bull’s
very nose, is the removal of the nuisances which abound in crowded
neighbourhoods from Land’s End to John o’Groats. The back-yards of
houses in poor neighbourhoods are so many gardens, sown broadcast with
the seeds of disease, and but too plentifully manured for abundant and
continual crops. When rain falls on the surface of these parterres of
poison, and is afterwards evaporated by the heat of the sun, there rises
a malaria, intensified by decomposing refuse, which, inhaled into human
lungs, engenders consumption, ending in the parish workhouse and death.
It is a fact that the surfaces of some of the back-yards in London have
been raised six feet by successive accumulations of vegetable and animal
refuse. We must have no more such accumulations; offal of every kind
must be removed daily by Act of Parliament.
Ill-kept stables, which cause horses to become blind, and men to die of
typhus, must be reformed; cow-feeding sheds, which produce diseased milk
and offensive refuse, must be abolished, and milk supplied per railway
from the country; disgusting and noxious manufactures, such as are
carried on a few yards west of Lambeth Palace, on the river’s bank, must
be removed to consort with knackers’ yards, in places remote from human
habitations.
The strong bar which John Bull opposes to such improvements is the dread
of the Centralisation, which, he says, carrying them into effect would
occasion. Local Government, he insists, is the great bulwark of the
British Constitution. No bill is ever brought into Parliament for the
good of the people,—that is well known,—but is passed for the sake of
the places it creates, and the patronage it gives. Now, if we allow a
practicable bill for the removal of these nuisances to pass, a swarm of
commissioners, secretaries, clerks, inspectors, inquisitors, dustmen,
and scavengers will be let loose upon the contented public, to supersede
snug, comfortable, local boards, and to ruin innocent contractors. “Is,”
John asks vehemently, “this to be borne?” and answers himself with equal
emphasis, “Decidedly not. We prefer the nuisances.” But common sense
steps in to reply, that as nuisances are a matter of taste, if every
board could confine its own nuisances to its own parish so as not to
take its neighbours by the nose, there would, perhaps, be no harm in
letting it doze and wallow in its own filth as long as its taste would
dictate. But as this is impossible, centralisation or no centralisation,
Government, or somebody else, _must_ interfere to protect the
extra-parochial lieges from destruction, by upsetting the Board and
removing the rest of the nuisances.
A practical example of the impossibility of confining noxious nuisances
to the boundaries whence they originate, is afforded in the immediate
neighbourhood of one of the most beautiful parts of the metropolis. In a
neighbourhood studded thickly with elegant villas and mansions—namely,
Bayswater and Notting Hill, in the parish of Kensington—is a plague spot
scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London: it is
called the Potteries. It comprises some seven or eight acres, with about
two hundred and sixty houses (if the term can be applied to such
hovels), and a population of nine hundred or one thousand. The
occupation of the inhabitants is principally pig-fattening; many
hundreds of pigs, ducks, and fowls are kept in an incredible state of
filth. Dogs abound for the purpose of guarding the swine. The atmosphere
is still further polluted by the process of fat-boiling. In these hovels
discontent, dirt, filth, and misery, are unsurpassed by anything known
even in Ireland. Water is supplied to only a small proportion of the
houses. There are foul ditches, open sewers, and defective drains,
smelling most offensively, and generating large quantities of poisonous
gases; stagnant water is found at every turn, not a drop of _clean_
water can be obtained,—all is charged to saturation with putrescent
matter. Wells have been sunk on some of the premises, but they have
become, in many instances, useless from organic matter soaking into
them; in some of the wells the water is perfectly black and fetid. The
paint on the window frames has become black from the action of
sulphuretted hydrogen gas. Nearly all the inhabitants look unhealthy,
the women especially complain of sickness, and want of appetite; their
eyes are shrunken, and their skin shrivelled.
The poisonous influence of this pestilential locality extends far and
wide. Some twelve or thirteen hundred feet off there is a row of clean
houses, called Crafter Terrace; the situation, though rather low, is
open and airy. On Saturday and Sunday, the 8th and 9th of September,
1849, the inhabitants complained of an intolerable stench, the wind then
blowing directly upon the Terrace from the Potteries. Up to this time,
there had been no case of cholera among the inhabitants; but the next
day the disease broke out virulently, and on the following day, the 11th
of September, a child died of cholera at No. 1. By the 22nd of the same
month, no less than seven persons in the Terrace lost their lives by
this fatal malady.
It would be thought, that such a state of things could not have been
permitted to remain undisturbed, but merely required to be brought to
light to be remedied. The medical officers have, time after time,
reported the condition of the place to the Board of Guardians. Fifteen
medical men have testified to the unhealthy state of the Potteries. The
inspector of nuisances has done the same. The magistrates have
repeatedly granted orders for the removal of the pigs. The General Board
of Health have given directions that all the nuisances should be
removed, yet nothing, or next to nothing, has been done. The inspector
of nuisances has been dismissed, the guardians have signified their
intention to inspect the districts themselves, yet things remain in
_statu quo_.
Is there then no possibility of cleansing this more than Augean stable?
None: the single but insurmountable difficulty being that some of the
worst parts of the district are the property of one of the guardians!
Surely the force of self-government can no farther go. Another word in
defence of centralisation—the great bugbear of the self-conceited parish
orator—would be wasted.
In conclusion, we earnestly call on the public to second and support the
efforts of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association to get the evils we
have adverted to lessened or wholly removed. The rapid increase of the
population demands additional exertion and additional arrangements for
their well-being. At present, retrogression instead of improvement
assails us. It is an appalling fact, that the number of persons dying of
the class of diseases called preventible has been steadily increasing.
Mr. Farr, of the Registrar-General’s office, has declared there could be
no question that the health of London is becoming worse every year. In
1846, the number of persons dying of zymotic or epidemic diseases was
about nineteen per cent. of the total mortality; in 1847, it was
twenty-eight per cent.; in 1848, thirty-four per cent.; and last year it
increased to forty-one per cent.; thus showing that nearly one-half of
the mortality of London was more or less owing to preventible causes.
To reverse this state of things the people of this country must not wait
for another great and fatal Fright. We know that typhus fever and
consumption, like open drains and stinking water, are mean, commonplace,
unexciting instruments of death, which do not get invested with dramatic
interest; yet they kill as unerringly as the knife or the bullet of the
assassin; only they murder great multitudes instead of single
individuals. If, therefore, he will only fix his eyes on the victims of
the diseases which can be easily prevented, it is well worth John Bull’s
while to consider whether substantially it is not as sound a policy to
save a million or two of lives per annum, as to hang the hero and
heroine of a Bermondsey murder.