Volume 3

The state and the doctor / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The state and the doctor / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lead to the complete disappearance of the pauper class. But experience and actual observation forced upon the Poor Law Commissioners the fact that a vast amount of pauperism was the direct and immediate result of ill-health. In 1838, only four years after their establishment, the Poor Law Commissioners had set Dr. Neil Arnott and Dr. J. Phillips Kay to investigate the causes of the “ fever ” in the Metropolis that was creating so much destitution ; and Dr. Southwood Smith to explore the circumstances which made Bethnal Green and Whitechapel so unhealthy, and therefore so poor.1 In the following year Dr. Southwood Smith was employed by the Poor Law Commissioners to prepare an elaborate report on the causes and effects of “ fever” in twenty Metropolitan parishes or Unions.2 The Poor Law Commissioners, in pointing out to the Government the amendments of the Poor Law that were required, expressly gave the first place to the measures to be taken to prevent the pauperism of ill-health. “ The most prominent and pressingn were c< the means of averting the charges on the poor rates which are caused by nuisances by which contagion is generated, and persons are reduced to destitution. ... All epidemics, and all infectious diseases, are attended with charges, immediate and ultimate, on the poor rates. Labourers are suddenly thrown, by infectious diseases, into a state of des¬ titution, for which immediate relief must be given. In the case of death the widow and the children are thrown as paupers on the parish. The amount of burdens thus produced is frequently so great as to i Fourth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1838. 2 Fifth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners, 1839.
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