Part 64
“As to the question, whether the sale of the flesh of oxen that have died from the diseases just described should be allowed, the council have already shown that, from time immemorial, the meat of cows attacked by pulmonary phthisis in a slight degree, has been consumed at Paris as good cow-beef. Often even cows which have reached the last stage of this disease are consigned to the butcher, who offers their flesh for sale as meat of the second quality, after taking the precaution to cut away the lungs, the pericardium, the mediastin, and those parts of the sides and diaphragm, which present a state of disorganization more or less advanced. This commerce has always taken place in the environs of Paris, and in Paris itself before the establishment of the _abattoirs_; and if we are not able to affirm that food of this nature is not bad, there is at least no example of its use having given rise to accidents. It is to be presumed that in this case, as in many others, the cooking destroys the vicious properties of the flesh, and deprives it of all the qualities injurious to the health of the consumer.
“The council have, however, been far from drawing from all these facts the conclusion that it is unnecessary to watch over the sale of butchers’ meat. They think, on the contrary, that this superintendence cannot be too active, in order that the low price of such meat may not lead poor families to make it habitually their principal sustenance. It is known that a bad diet which is not injurious when used casually, may become, by its continual employment, a source of disease. Numerous observations have equally taught us, that the flesh of animals in which putrefaction had commenced, has produced in persons who touched it the most serious consequences. The council, building upon such data, believe that it is indispensable to watch with the greatest care the sale of meat, to have destroyed all the bad meat which is exposed in the shops, and to forbid the butchers to sell the flesh of any animal that has died from disease, or been killed in consequence of disease, unless a veterinary surgeon and physician, appointed by authority, have decided that the meat could be eaten without inconvenience.”
Some considerations of a kind still more general are developed in the important report made by the commission, charged in 1839 with the investigation of the disease called _cocotte_, which attacked the milking-cows, and deeply occupied the public attention.
We stated at the commencement of this article, that the number of reports made by the “Conseil de Salubrité,” during the years comprised in this account, amounts to 4431. This number greatly surpasses in its proportions that of the preceding years, that is to say, of the twenty years which form the first period of their labours, dating from their institution, and which only presents a total of 5008 reports. This arises from the fact that Paris for a long time has been only a city of produce, and that the labours of the council have necessarily increased with the progress of trade, and the character, altogether manufacturing, assumed by the department of the Seine since 1815. It is necessary, moreover, to remark that the provisions of the decree of 1810 on insalubrious establishments, by submitting certain classes of manufactories to special authorizations, rendered more frequent the intervention of the council, who were the first to demonstrate the necessity of these new measures. “It is a great satisfaction to the council,” say the reporters of their labours for the year 1810, “that every year the observations and reports lead to general measures which simplify your administration, by giving certain rules of which the application becomes every day more easy. The public health was long since compromised by the existence of certain manufactures, and in the general accounts we have rendered we have never ceased to demand the removal of insalubrious establishments. The National Institute, consulted on this important point, shared our opinion, and a regulatory law has just designated the manufactures which may be established in the interior of towns, and those which are not to be tolerated there.”
In the year 1811 we find 118 reports on classed establishments. This number increased in 1812, and so from year to year, till in 1813, 313 reports were made on establishments of this kind. The use of steam-engines increased the labours of the council. In 1813, for instance, there was but one report on these engines; in 1822, the number had risen already to fifteen. The examination of these machines led the council to examine their different systems, the dangers and inconveniences they presented to the public health or safety, and we foresee, in reading their important observations on this subject, all the improvements which experience introduced in the sequel into this new branch of industry. If we pass from the year 1822 to the year 1839, we find there has been read ninety-six reports on engines of this description: but they are no longer simple considerations on machines of which the use is not well understood; they are views of an elevated order, both on the application of these engines, and on their dangers and inconveniences. We see that the council have profoundly studied these important questions.
“We have united under one head,” says M. Busy, the reporter, “all the establishments on which reports have been made relative to steam-engines. Each of these establishments doubtless offers by itself some inconveniences inherent in the kind of trade carried on; but in general these inconveniences are trifling. The greater part of the manufactories about which there is a question are for the construction of engines, and other analogous things, which can only affect the neighbourhood by the noise and activity which reign there. Out of sixty-three reports made to the council on steam-engines, eleven were on sawing-machines, nine on shops for the construction of engines, six on fulminating powder-mills, four on factories for printing and preparing stuffs, three on mechanical printing presses. The other reports are divided in the following manner:
“On machines for flattening metal, for bruising colours, for pulverizing, for mixing mortar, for extracting stone, seven; for sugar refining, for the making of sugar of starch, three; for spinning, two; for turning, two; for optical glasses, two; for polishing steel, one; for cleaning grain, for the preservation of provisions, three; for perfumery, two: for soap-making, two; for bleaching, for making candles, hats, and delf-ware, for ironfounding, for scouring ashes, six; total 63.
“There has been made besides on simple steam-boilers 33 reports, divided among different trades in the following manner, viz:—
For printing and preparing of stuffs and woollens 12 Hat manufactories 7 Wax and tallow candle manufactories 3 The shops of mechanicians 2 Refining 2 Soap-making 2 Extraction of the colouring matter from dye-woods 2 Baths 2 Dyeing 1
“If we add these 33 reports to the 63 preceding, we have a total of 96 reports on steam-engines, or simple boilers. We join them together in consequence of the identity of the inconveniences to which these machines give rise. These inconveniences can only proceed from the chance of explosion of compressed steam, or from the chance of fire, and from the presence of smoke, which accompany the establishment of every furnace, whatever may be its use. It is true, however, that among the complaints or objections which have reached the council, several have turned upon the noise and shaking occasioned by the steam-engines, a shaking which is particularly felt in houses a little shut in, and connected with the neighbouring houses. This occurred with the printing presses, and some other mechanical applications of steam.
“But these results are altogether independent of the steam itself, are inherent in the imperfection of the mechanism employed, and would be produced with much greater intensity by substituting for steam a horse, a fall of water, the action of the wind, or any other mechanical motor.
“If we consider the steam-engines and boilers with respect to the explosions to which they may give birth, we see that no accident has happened during the current year from a total or partial explosion of an engine, and yet there is no complaint or opposition which is not swelled by the fear of these dangers. If the accidents of this nature may with justice, by their seriousness and sphere of action, provoke the fears of the neighbours, the wise measures prescribed by the rules are of a nature to render them impossible, when they are faithfully executed. Thus, Monsieur le Prefect, the council have always vigorously insisted on the maintenance of the precautions with which the law surrounds the steam-engines, not only to shield the responsibility of your administration, but also because they are persuaded that it is impossible in the actual state of things to neglect these prescriptions without exposing those who make use of steam-engines to eminent dangers.
“The true and the most serious inconvenience of steam-engines is the smoke. It is against this that most of the well-founded complaints are raised.
“This inconvenience is not only felt at the present moment, but it excites, above all, apprehensions for the future.
“When we consider that in the single year 1839, there have been granted 82 authorizations for steam-engines, and that we are yet but at the beginning of the applications of this mechanical agent,—when we follow the increasing progression of petitions addressed to the administration, we are not able to suppress a certain fear against the ulterior invasions of the smoke from these establishments.
“The council have applied themselves for a long time to the solution of this difficulty, which is met at every turn in the petitions addressed to you, not only for steam-engines, but for all the trades in which furnaces are employed.
“Various systems have been proposed: that which first presents itself is the use of smoke-consuming furnaces, which appears in fact the most rational and appropriate. Nevertheless, although it is very easy to assign the theoretical conditions for complete combustion of coal, the difficulties of application have not permitted this kind of furnace to become general. Hitherto the smoke-consuming furnaces require great precision in the execution, great regularity in the distribution of the fuel,—things difficult to realize in ordinary labour. On the other hand, the great excess of air necessary to obtain complete combustion often diminishes the efficacy of the coal, and renders these furnaces more expensive, in certain cases, than the ordinary furnaces, in spite of the loss of fuel which the latter involve.
“The mechanical distributors to regulate the supply of fuel, and the activity of the combustion, have been also proposed and employed with success; but they are a considerable expense at the outset, and can be but little adopted except in great concerns, and where there is a very constant application of steam.
“It remains to modify the nature of the fuel; and it is this which the council have generally done. They commonly prescribe the use of coke, or some variety of prepared coal, which gives no smoke—leaving it however to the proprietors to make use of whichever method suits them best, whether smoke-consuming furnaces, mechanical distributors, or fuel which yields no smoke.
“These regulations, Monsieur le Prefect, have been adopted in principle by the “Conseil de Salubrité,” and are, in the majority of cases, the condition to which they think it their duty to submit the authorizations they have the honour to propose to you.
“Doubtless their rigorous application may cramp certain establishments. The council are not ignorant that for some particular purposes the use of coke presents great obstacles, considering the construction of the furnaces; but the absence of smoke in the combustion of coal is not so very difficult to obtain, as to shake the intimate conviction of the council that this constriction will be but momentary, and that it will end by turning to the profit of the manufacturer.
“The problem of which the council seek the solution, is able to be resolved; it is so already in great part, but there yet remains one step to arrive at the goal, and they will reach it by persevering in the course they have adopted. In their efforts they have been sustained, we repeat, by the conviction that they labour not only for the advantage of the health and cleanliness of the capital, by seeking to guarantee its inhabitants from the nuisance of smoke, but also for the advantage of the manufacturer himself, by forcing him to a better employment of his fuel, and by putting him into such a condition that he may be able to select the localities which suit him, without being exposed to those continual complaints, to those recriminations, often well-founded, which have not always been foreseen, and which sometimes become the cause of the greatest embarrassments to the manufacturing establishments.
“An important progress in the path we indicate was made in 1839, by the contrivance of M. Beslay, a mechanician, for steam-boilers—a contrivance which has been pointed out in several reports on this subject, and which proposes to prevent explosions and avoid smoke by means of a general use of coke. It is only to be regretted that it has not yet been able to be applied to all the purposes for which steam-boilers are employed.”
The improvements introduced by the council into the different branches of industry with which they have had to deal, and on which their reports enter into details at once useful and interesting, are numerous. Thus the refining of gold and silver, the factories for fulminating powder, for gilding, for chemical products, for bitumen, for melting tallow, and a mass of other trades, owe to them notable improvements, both in the methods of fabrication, and in the conditions for public health and safety under which they are to be carried on. The white-lead manufactories have excited their earnest solicitude. It is known that the workmen who labour in these places are subject to serious and frequent maladies. In consulting the earlier labours of the council, we see them unceasingly occupied with this question; but the frequency of the accidents, and their seriousness, have more particularly attracted their attention in these latter times, and have engaged them to compile a set of instructions which set forth the best rules of health to be observed in these manufactories. (The rules have already been quoted.)
Later, the council have anew examined deeply this branch of trade. They have visited the manufactories of white-lead existing in the department of the Seine; they have obtained the experience of other departments, and they have shown the necessity of commissioning one of their members to follow the results of the rules quoted above. They have required, moreover, that the administration should furnish some statistics on the state of workers in white-lead admitted into the hospital. The administration has hastened to defer to this wish, and there is no doubt that there will result a sensible improvement in the health of the workmen.
(After giving several other minor instances of the labours of the Conseil, the report thus concludes:—)
And now that we have detailed the principal labours of the council, it would be a necessary supplement to this article to show the results that have followed from them,—the reforms they have introduced into the public service. But here we are no more dealing with the labours of the council, but with the labours of the administration. Thus independently of the decisions on classed establishments, and which amount to about 300 a-year, it would be necessary to describe the measures for the public health executed by the administration. But to confine ourselves only to acts which interest the generality of the citizens, we may cite the ordinances of police which relate to coloured sugar-plums; to horses attacked with the glanders, or contagious maladies; to vessels and utensils of copper; to the adulteration of salt; to the aid to be given to the drowned and asphyxied; to the depôts for refuse in the rural communes; to the dissection, modelling, and embalming of corpses; to the cleaning of wells and waste-water wells; to the adulteration and sale of fulminating powder; to the classification of new trades, the amphitheatres of anatomy, the establishments of pork-butchers, &c. &c.
Certainly there are few institutions that can show such results; there are few that receive an impulse so enlightened and constant. Bound in an intimate manner with the administration of which they form part, the “Conseil de Salubrité” has at all times, found in it a just appreciator of their labours. They know the credit accorded to their reports, and the duties imposed on them by a confidence so honourable for the administration that gives it, and so justly merited by the body that receives it.
16.—_Qualifications of Officers of Public Health: Statement by_ M. DUCHÂTELET.
It is generally thought in the world that the medical knowledge acquired in the schools is all that is necessary to become a useful member of the council. The greater part of medical men themselves share this opinion; and on the strength of some precepts which they have collected from books on health and professions, they think themselves sufficiently instructed to decide on the instant the gravest questions, which can only be resolved by special studies.
A man may have exhausted medical literature; he may be an excellent practician at the sick-bed, a learned physician, a clever and eloquent professor; but all these acquirements, taken in themselves, are nearly useless in a Conseil de Salubrité like that of Paris; and if an occasion presents itself to make use of them, a very small number of persons suffice to apply them. To be really useful in the council, it is necessary to have an extended knowledge of natural philosophy, of the constitution of the soil on which Paris stands, and of the geology of neighbouring countries; it is necessary, above all, to know with exactness the action which trades may have on the health of those who exercise them, and the much more important action of manufactories of every species on plants, on men congregated in towns, and on animals. This knowledge, so important, of the action of manufactories and trades, is not to be acquired by ordinary study, or in the silence of the cabinet. It is not to be obtained without positive notions on the arts, and on the greater part of the processes peculiar to each trade. It requires habit and the frequenting of the places of work. In this particular, more even than with medicine, books are not a substitute for practice; and if there exist works on the subject, they are more likely to mislead than enlighten.
From what has been said, the necessity will be evident to introduce into the council those physicians who have made health, and particularly the public health, a special study; and to join with them chemists, and, above all, manufacturing chemists, because what would many of those persons, whose life has been passed in hospitals and the exclusive study of medicine, be before a steam engine? It is clear that they would often be deceived by those adroit and skilful manufacturers who would have an interest in concealing the truth.
17.—_Instance by_ MM. DUCHÂTELET _and_ D’ARCET _of the erroneous Medical Inferences as to the insalubrity of particular Trades_.
Ramazzini is, as far as we know, the first who has treated professedly of the maladies produced by the fumes of tobacco. In his great work, _De Morbis Artificum_, he states that the workmen employed in the manufacture of tobacco are seized with great pains in the head, with vertigo, nausea, and perpetual sneezing; and that so great is the subtilty of this substance, that all the neighbourhood, particularly in summer, experience nausea. He adds, that those who work on tobacco lose their appetite, and that their breath is insupportable.
Fourcroy, after repeating in his translation of Ramazzini all the passages from this author, adds, in a note, several observations to prove the dangers of tobacco; such as, that a lady died from a cancer in the nose in consequence of taking too much snuff; another from a polypus in the œsophagus, which prevented her swallowing; another from frightful convulsions produced by sleeping in a room in which tobacco had been rasped. Fourcroy states, however, that there are some privileged persons who become accustomed to the action of tobacco, and experience no inconvenience from it.
Cadet-Gassicourt, in a memoir addressed to the prefect of police on the maladies incident to the trades carried on in Paris, says that the workmen occupied in the preparation of tobacco are subject to vomitings, colics, and acute and chronic affections of the chest; that they have often vertigo, bloody fluxes, and are addicted to drink.
Tourtelle, in his _Elémens d’Hygiène_, affirms that it is very dangerous to sleep in warehouses of tobacco; and he quotes a case, mentioned by Buchoz, of a young girl of five, who died in a short time from dreadful vomitings, occasioned by this sole cause.
Percy, in the article _Chapeau_, in the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_, mentions, that some soldiers, exercising in the _Champ-de-Mars_ in very warm weather, were overcome by syncope, which he attributes to some tobacco that these men had put in their caps.
In a new edition of Ramazzini and Fourcroy, by Patissier, we find the opinions of these authors without observation or comment. The editor is content to add, that those who have to do with tobacco are, in general, wasted, discoloured, yellow, and asthmatical.
Finally, Merat, in the article _Tabac_, in the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_, says, that men engaged in the preparation of this substance are wasted, discoloured, yellow, asthmatic, subject to colic, diarrhœa, the bloody flux, but, above all, to vertigo, cephalalgia, muscular tremor, to true narcotism, and to diseases, more or less acute, of the chest. “All these assertions,” he continues, “are the fruit of my observations in the hospitals of Paris. Tobacco causes not only evils without number, but even death to those who prepare it. It deranges the memory of all who inhale it, and renders it less clear and entire; it weakens the tissues, especially the nervous tissues; it causes trembling of the limbs; diminishes strength; it produces emaciation, and even consumption, particularly among females; and sometimes begets entire imbecility.”
“We might multiply these quotations. The just celebrity of the authors who have furnished them gives to their opinion a force which imposes belief, and makes us reject every species of doubt. Let us recall, however, the maxim of Descartes; let us cease to believe the words of a master; let us dare to doubt for an instant, and, observing for ourselves, let us learn to form an opinion, based on what our own senses and judgment have taught us.”