The principles of physiology applied to the preservation of health, and to the improvement of physical and mental education / by Andrew Combe.

Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The principles of physiology applied to the preservation of health, and to the improvement of physical and mental education / by Andrew Combe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    I this general rate of the whole king- 1 dom is subject to great variations in I difterent localities, according to the 1 various influences which act on the health of the community. Thus in some of the large manufacturing towns, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Leeds, the rate of mor- tality is so high as 1 in 30 : while, on the other hand, in the more healthy rural andsuburhan districts, it falls to 1 in 60, and occasionally even to 1 in 67. From some disturbing causes, which it is unnecessary here to parti- cularise, the difference between the health of urbaii and rural populations is not so great as these figures would imply ; but after every correction has been made, it remains undeniable that there occurs in the cities a large an- nual loss of life beyond that to which the inhabitants of the country are sub- i ject, and which is in a great degree capable of being removed by proper sanitary regulations. But there is no reason to sujipose that even in rural districts the people enjoy the maximum degree of health, and that the actual mortality may not be reduced. So far, indeed, is this from being the case, that Mr Simon, in his First Re- port to the Commissioners of Sewers for the City of London, is sanguine enough to express the belief that the mortality of the City itself may, bv judicious sanitary measures, be re- j duced from 1 in 30 (in 1848-49) to 1 ! in 66, or considerably below the ave- ! rage rural rate. But if, without I venturing to entertain such pleasing I anticipations, we assume merely that j sanitary legislation is capable of ef- j fecting a reduction in the general rate I of mortality to 1 in 50, it will follow that, in a population of 16,000,000, the annual saving of human life in England and Wales will amount, in J round numbers, to 30,000 ; and, if the calculation be extended, on the same basis, to Scotland and Ireland, the I number of lives annually saved in I the United Kingdom will amount to ] 50,000. Moreover, it has been calcu- lated that for every case of sickness which terminates in death there are twenty which recover; and, if we ad- mit this proportion as approaching the truth, there are thus found to afflict annually the people of Great Britain and Ireland the avoidable evils of about fifty thousand deaths and a million cases of sickness, with all their con- comitant pain and misery, and their melancholy train of poverty, orphan- age, and widowhood—the progeny of mere neglect of the laws of health.* For evidence of the evils conse- quent on the deficiency of physiologi- cal knowledge even among those who have received a good general educa- tion, I may refer to the lamentable ignorance displayed in Parliament, by very intelligent men, during the frequent discussions which took place a few years ago on the regulation of infant labour in factories and mills. Previously to 1833, the law authorised the working of children between the years of eight and six- teen, in the close, heated atmo- sjjhere of a cotton mill, for 12 hours a-day; and as a great boon, by the Factories' Regulation Bill passed in that year, no children were to be em- ployed under nine years of age, while, between that and fourteen, the period of daily labour was not to exceed eight hours. Had our legislators been instructed in anatomy and physiology so far as to obtain even the most ge- neral notion of the constitution of the human body, and had they been aware of the intimate dependence of the mind on the condition of the bodily organism, they would at once have per- ceived the destructive tendency of the former system of labour and confine- ment, and the impossibility of combin- ing with it that moral and intellectual cultivation which is so imperatively required. Instead of objecting to the limitation when it was proposed, they would have looked forward with dread to the physical aTid moral degradation which the system then in operation was calculated to effect in the multi- tudes under its influence ; and their only doubt would have been, whether * For more ample detoils, see an instruc- live article in the British and Foreign Medico-Chirui-gical Review, vol. i. p. 1.
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