Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley.

  • Charles Kingsley
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitary and social lectures and essays / by Charles Kingsley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/320 page 27
    not see ? Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal— we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who—looking at them from a merely physical point of view—are most fit to die. Everything which makes it more easy to live ; every sanatory reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols; every reformatory school, every hospital, every cure of drunkenness, every influence, in short, which has—so I am told—increased the average length of life in these islands, by nearly one-third, since the first establishment of life insurances, one hundred and fifty years ago; every influence of this kind, I say, saves persons alive who would otherwise have died; and the great majority of these will be, even in surgical and zymotic cases, those of least resisting power, who are thus preserved to produce in time a still less powerful progeny. Do I say that we ought not to save these people if we can ? God forbid. The weakly, the diseased whether infant or adult, is hero on earth; a British citizen; no more responsible for his own weakness than for his own existence. Society, that is, in plain English, wo and our ancestors, ore responsible for
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3