Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Sanitary review of the Session / 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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![life, for the reduction of the diseases which belong to those stages, and for the improvement of mental as well as physical progress. He did not confine his notice to the sujjerior educational institutions for the few, but he gave his atten- tion to a typical one for the lowest and the many. He went to see an indiistrial school—that is to say, a half- time school, based on the half-time principle of mixed ])hysical and mental training, as all the district orphanages, and the reformatory and industrial schools, comprising some forty thousand of children; now are. A better instance of the iDOwer of sanitation in the infantile stages of life could not be presented, for of the children who do enter into these institutions, the death-i’ates do not exceed three in a thousand, not a third of those above the children of the oiTtside general population, not a foui’th above the children of the slums which the Prince had seen. In the well- managed of these institutions, by frequent head-to-foot washing with tepid water the “children’s diseases” are almost banished ; in one with eight liundred children, visited recently tliey had not seen a case of measles for twelve years. In scholastic attainments, those half-time children are generally found to be in advance of tlie orphan children brought in who have been trained in the long-time schools. And in these half-time schools, as a rule, there are no headaches, and none of that evidence of over-pressure which, whatso- ever Mr. Mundella and my Lord Aberdare may have been pei’suaded, will be jiroved before any select committee by medical officers, as well as by teachers, to be prevalent, as con- sequences of the insanitary conditions of their long-time code schools. Of the slums, it is to be observed, that the progenies reared there iinder insanitary conditions comprise the great seed plots of mendicancy and of habitual crime. It may be taken as proved that at the cost to the public fir.st and last of one living by spoil and mendicancy, in the Industrial and District Schools three are sent to the good as law-abiding and productive subjects. The next chief event affecting sanitary science that has occurred since we last met has, I consider, been the judg- ment by Lord Bramwell and his colleagues of the commission of inquiry on the pollution of the Thames, that its con- dition is a disgrace to the metropolis and to civilisation.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22313059_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
