Health of Town's Association. Unhealthiness of towns, its causes and remedies / [William A. Guy].

  • William Augustus Guy
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health of Town's Association. Unhealthiness of towns, its causes and remedies / [William A. Guy]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sanitary measures is constantly entailing upon us—a los3 of which the extent may be judged by the aid of an expres¬ sion so often quoted that it will soon pass into a proverb, that “ the annual slaughter in England and Wales, from pre- ventible causes of typhus fever alone, which attacks persons in the vigour of life, is double the amount of what was suffered by the allied armies in the battle of Waterloo I have now presented you with an estimate or rough calculation of the waste of human life which takes place year by year in England and Wales, and chiefly in the large towns, and I am quite sure that as patriotic English¬ men you view that waste in the light of a great calamity, and, if it shall be proved to depend upon causes admitting of removal, as a great national disgrace. But I must not forget that I am addressing a London audience, and that you must be naturally anxious to hear something about the sanitary state of your own city. As the residence of the monarch, the seat of government, the resort of fashion, the centre of intelligence, the metro¬ polis of the largest, richest, most powerful, and most civi¬ lized empire in the world, it ought to be an example to the rest of the empire, and a model to other nations. And so, in many respects, it is. Its parks, its squares, its bridges, its leading thoroughfares are unrivalled ; it is the best-lighted and best-paved capital in the world, and the house-accommodation of its more opulent inhabitants is certainly of a very superior kind. Those who have never quitted the pavement of its principal streets (and this is the case with most visitors, and a large proportion of its wealthier inhabitants) would pronounce it, in spite of the bad taste displayed in so many of its public edifices, a handsome and a noble city. But it is no exception to the rule of large cities. The lofty houses and the glittering shops which skirt its principal thoroughfares are but so many showy screens to hide from sight the wretched dwellings of the poor, which, revealed for a short space by some grand improvement, have scarcely time to air themselves before they are again shut out from view. Fortunately there are so many of these improvements going on at the present time, that you must all have ob¬ served for yourselves how very wide the difference is between the large streets and the small ones—the abodes of the rich, or the shops of the fashionable parts of the town, and the wretched courts and alleys in which the poor reside. I shall not enlarge at present on this sub¬ ject, but must return to the consideration of the sanitary state of the metropolis.