Part 2

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.

WHAT THERE IS IN THE ROOF OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.

Perhaps no one of the London Squares is more full of interesting associations, and certainly no one of them is more fresh and pleasant to look upon, than Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the centre of its green Lord William Russell was beheaded; upon the old wall that used to run along its eastern side Ben Jonson, it is said, worked as a bricklayer; amongst its north range of buildings stands the thin sandwich of a house that holds the manifold artistic gems of the Soane Museum; its west side was the scene of some of Lord George Gordon’s riotings; whilst on its south side stands the noble-looking Grecian fronted building dedicated to the purposes of the English College of Surgeons.

This building has many uses, and many points challenging general admiration and approval, the chief of them being its possession of the museum made by John Hunter; afterwards purchased, and now supported, by the nation; and open freely, not only to medical men of all countries, but to the public at large. The visitor who passes under its handsome portico, up the steps and enters its heavy mahogany and plate-glass doors, finds himself in a large hall. On his right is a staid-looking, black-robed porter, who requires him to enter his name in the visitor’s book—a preliminary which members equally with strangers have to go through. On his left are the doors leading to the secretary’s office, where students may, from time to time, be seen going in to register their attendance upon the prescribed lectures, and, later in their career, passing through the same portals big with the desperate announcement that they are ready to submit to the examinations that must be passed before they can get a diploma. Facing the entrance door is a second enclosed hall, with a roof supported by fluted columns, and on the left of this a broad stately architectural stone staircase leading to the library and the council-chamber—the scene of those dreadful ordeals, the examinations, where Hospital Surgeons sit surrounded by crimson and gold, and marble busts, and noble pictures, to _operate_ upon sweating and stuttering and hesitating students who, two by two, are seated in large chairs to be passed or _plucked_.

The library is a noble, large room, of excellent proportions, occupying the whole length of the building in front, having tall plate-glass embayed windows, each with its table and chair; and in each of which the passersby in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, may generally see a live surgeon framed and glazed, busily occupied with his books, or still more busily helping to keep up the tide of gossip for which the place is celebrated. For some twenty feet from the floor on all sides, the walls are lined with books, telling in various languages about all kinds of maladies and all sorts of plans for cure. Above this, and just under the handsomely panelled roof, hang portraits of old surgeons, each famous in his time, and now enjoying a sort of quiet renown amongst their successors in the art and science of chirurgery. All we have seen thus far, betokens the quiet repose of wealth, dignity, and learned leisure and ease. No bustle, no noise, no trace of urgent labour is heard or seen. Such of the officers of the place as may be encountered, have a look of somnolent if not sleek sufficiency, and seem to claim a share of the consideration which all are ready to concede, as due to the character of the spot. Returning to the hall, another door, facing that of the secretary, leads to the great attraction and pride of the place—the Hunterian Museum—a collection of skeletons and glittering rows of bottles full of evidences how “fearfully and wonderfully” all living creatures are made. On all sides we see the bony relics of defunct men and animals—giants, dwarfs, both human and quadruped, challenging attention. The huge megatherium, the bones of poor Chuny, the elephant shot in Exeter ’Change, the skeleton of O’Brien the Irish giant, who walked about the world eight feet high, and near him all that remains of the form of the Sicilian dwarf, who when alive was not taller than O’Brien’s knee. On the walls tier after tier of bottles are ranged, till the eye following them up towards the top of the building, fatigued by their innumerable abundance, and the variety of their contents, again seeks the ground and its tables, there to encounter an almost equal crowd of curious things collected from the earth, the air, and the sea, to show how infinite the varieties in which Nature indulges, and how almost more than infinite the curious ways in which life varies the tenement it inhabits. But with this multiplicity of things we see no confusion, or trace of carelessness or poverty. All is neatness, order, and repose. Not a particle of dirt offends the eye; not a film of dust dims the brilliancy of the regiments of bottles drawn up in long files upon the shelves, to salute the visitor. The place is a very drawing-room of science, all polished and set forth in trim order for the reception of the public. It is the best room in the house kept for the display of _the results_ of the labours of the physiologist,—a spot devoted to the revelations of anatomy, without the horrifying accompaniments of the dissecting-room.

Thus far we have passed through what are in truth the public portions of the College of Surgeons, just glancing at its museum, unequalled as a physiological collection by any other in the world. In their surprise at the curious things it contains, there are many, no doubt, who wonder also where the things all came from; and what patient men have gone on since John Hunter’s time, adding to his museum where it was deficient and keeping all its parts in their present admirable state. Such a question, if put to the officials, would most likely obtain a very vague and misty reply; but a glance behind the scenes at the College will afford an ample and curious explanation, and show how one section of the Searchers for Facts, silently and unheeded, work on in their self-chosen, quiet, scientific path—undisturbed by the noises and the bustle, the excitements and the strife of the modern Babylon, that heaves and throbs around them.

Leave the handsome rooms, with their clear light, and polish, and air of neatness, and come with us up the side stair that leads to the unshown recesses, where, high up in the roof, the workers in anatomy carry on their strange duties. As we open the side door that leads towards these secret chambers, we should go from daylight to darkness, were it not for the gas that is kept burning there. Up the stairs we go, and as we ascend, the way becomes lighter and lighter as we rise, but the stone steps soon change for wooden ones, and at length bring us from the silent stairs to a silent and gloomy-looking passage, having three doors opening into it, and some contrivances overhead for letting in a little light, and letting out certain odours that here abound,—greatly to the discomfort of the novice who first inhales them. We are now in the roof of the building, and on getting a glimpse through a window, we may see the housetops are below us, the only companions of our elevation being a number of neighbouring church-spires.