On the decrease of disease effected by the progress of civilisation / by C.F.H. Marx, M.D. ... and R. Willis, M.D.

  • Karl Friedrich Heinrich Marx
Date:
1844
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the decrease of disease effected by the progress of civilisation / by C.F.H. Marx, M.D. ... and R. Willis, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    56/152 page 44
    NEW MEDICINES. greatest mean duration of liumanlife, namely, 38years, also occurs* : in Russia, on the contrary, it is no more than 21 yearsf. The man in comfortahle or affluent circumstances does not only live better; he hves longer. But the means of preserving health, and of recover- ing it when lost, are made every day more accessible to him vrho is less favoured of fortune ; whilst com- merce has made it more easy to procure medicinal substances of every description. It is no trifling recommendation of modern medicine, in its pro- gressive improvement, to say, that it has discovered at once more powerful and less costly medicines than were formerly in use. Before the discovery of bark, how long must the sufferer from intermittent fever have been laid up useless, incapable of all exertion ! how often must he have been the victim of the con- sequences of this once universal disease! But how * Hawkins's conclusion (op. cit. p. 30) is fully borne out by the facts, when he says, The man of affluence, the pauper patient of an hospital, tlae soldier and sailor on active service, the prisoner of war, the inmate of a gaol, aU enjoy a better tenure of existence from this country than from any other of which we have been able to consult the records. [See a curious fact stated a few pages back, from which it appears that the absolute pauper has a better life than the artizan by about a dozen years, and than the gentleman by something more than a year. Eng. Ed.] f Cooper, Duration of Life, p. 23. An observation of Villerme, in connexion with England, is this: In Archangel, between 1809—1827, there were 15,017 births, and 18,323 deaths. In the course of eighteen years, therefore, the deaths exceeded the births by 3306. In England, on the contrary, for every 100 deaths there have long been very regularly 101,133 births, so that the population doubles itself every 75 years.
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