General remarks on the health of English manufacturers : and on the need which exists for the establishment of convalescents' retreats as subservient to the medical charities of our large towns / by John Roberton.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General remarks on the health of English manufacturers : and on the need which exists for the establishment of convalescents' retreats as subservient to the medical charities of our large towns / by John Roberton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    stomach and bowels, and also render the mind torpid and irritable : further, that this uncomfortable condition of body and mind, existing in almost every individual of great masses of people crowded together in factories, and in the narrow streets and yards where they have their habitations, is apt gradually to increase, and to be aggravated by the very means but too commonly adopted to obtain relief; which are habitual or frequent drunkenness, the stimulus of crude and fantastical politics, the still stronger stimulus of riot and uproar, and not unfrequently, as the recent annals of our county unhappily attest, of savage or malignant crime. It is to be regretted that nearly all our recent writers on political economy should have acted too much as the partisan advocates of certain theories, rather than as the enlightened friends of our common humanity. Hence, while thev have disclaimed for their science every object except the production of wealth, they have been eager to prove that the increasing wealth of the country has produced, upon the whole, the most happy consequences to all classes of people; a conclusion which is certainly opposed by a great multi- tude of incontrovertible facts. It is true that during the last eighty years the middle class, consisting of those who subsist by some business or profession, in contra-distinction to the low'er class who live on the wages of manual labour, and the higher class who are born to wealth, has greatly increased in number, opulence, and intelligence. Moreover, this class now occupies a much wider range in the scale of society than formerly ; its upper grades vicing in wealth and
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