HEALTH BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

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 461individuals 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 462food, 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 463and 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.

464