Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick.

  • Chadwick, Edwin, 1800-1890.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary progress : address of the President of Section A, Brighton Health Congress, Wednesday, December 14th, 1881 on the prevention of epidemics / by Edwin Chadwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    concern was with the smaller loss was honoured and conserved for further care and improvement; whilst the preventive ser- vice, conserved in the larger conservation offeree, was allowed to pass away unnoticed and unrewarded. But it did appear to me that the service rendered by the Army Sanitary Commis- sion, composed of sanitary officers trained under our first General Board of Health, who, it was declared by the War Minister, had saved the second army in the Crimea, had been allowed to pass away, unapplied and unappreciated—when it did appear io me that the experience gained in the Crimea might have been applied to the saving of our army in India, and, in 1858, I wrote an expository paper to that purpose. At the instance mainly of the Secretary of State for India and Miss Florence Nightingale a Commission of the War Department (of which the surviving members are now Dr. J. Sutherland and Captain Galton, after it had completed the great improvement of barracks and hospitals at home, and which have reduced the home army death-rates by one half) was got to work as a Commission for the Protection and the Sanitary Improvement of the Army in India and other places. The ser- vice of that Commission for twenty years has been rendered mainly by two of the sanitary commissioners trained by vis, whose labours had saved that army in the Crimea; namely. Dr. Suther- land and Mr. Robert Rawlinson, and subsequently also by Cap- tain Galton. By the last returns it appears that the death-rate Examples in the Indian army, which was formerly 69 in a thousand, was 'rf'economy during the last decade less than 20 per 1,000 ; and that during by crood that decade there has been a saving of life of 28,000 men, and a saving of force from sickness of abovit the same number, and tary ser- a total saving of nearly double the British army at Waterloo, '^'ic'^- But no account is taken of the saving in money. It is an under- estimate at 100/. per man, which makes the money-saving during the decade 5,321,700/. for that period, an economy which may be commended to the attention of the Premier as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to Parliament, with the assurance that with a due attention to past sanitary service, and to the im- provement of its organisation, and effective position for the future—a yet greater economy may be effected. In further assurance of this, we may recall the partial economies of sanitation accruing,—the economies first achieved, as I have recited, by our defences against the extraordinary epidemic with which we had to contend, when the savings of the ex- ]3enses of funerals, from premature deaths throughout Great Britain, must have been about as much as if the whole of the present population of the City of London, 50,000, were killed.