Address of Edwin Chadwick, Esq., C.B., as vice president of the Public Health Section to the General Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Glasgow, September 29th, 1860.

  • Edwin Chadwick
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address of Edwin Chadwick, Esq., C.B., as vice president of the Public Health Section to the General Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Glasgow, September 29th, 1860. 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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    in sewing and in other industrial occupations, are fully equal to those of the boys in the same schools, who are exclusively occupied in book learning. It is common to hear the manly education of English youth, and of the healthy exercise they have received in boat-racing and cricket, made matter of boast; but of what class of youth, and what proportion of the population, do they form who receive these advan- tages ? In the densely covered town districts what space is there for artisans’ children to partake of any such exercises ? or what time is there after the present school hours to get to any space out of the town to engage in them ? These or other games ought to he main- tained and provided for, but they do not, however, dispense with sys- tematised bodily training. Cricket often leaves contracted chests, which a well-applied drill or systematised gymnastics expand; round shoulders, which the drill makes straight; shambling gait, which the drill makes regular and firm and quick. The youth of Eton and Oxford, I have been assured by the collegiate authorities, are greatly improved in health and strength and in eveiy way, by the mili- tary drill in addition to their common exercises. For the middle and higher classes who could afford it, the cavalry drill, or horse exercise, would be a valuable sanitary as well as a civil and military improvement. As denoting the connexion between body and mind, it may be meiitioned, that as a general rule, to which there are fewer exceptions than might be supposed, those who are foremost in the drill andin bodily exercises are fouJid, in low schools as well as high, to be the foremost in mental exercises. Our higher education, which governs the education of the middle and the lower class, is assumed to be classical, but in 1,he hands of the ecclesiastics of the middle ages from whom it is derived it ceased to be so ; it is not now so, and our movement ought to be to make it strictly so ; for the really classical ciUfcatiou, advocated by Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, and maintained by the Romans during their greatest strength, was divided into three parts, of which one was mental training, that of the school teacher; another bodily, of the gymnasiarch; and a third, accomplish- ment, such as music. But care and exertion Avill be required that suitalfie provision is made for the bodily as well as mental training of females. The [evils I have described as arising from an excess of bodily constraint, and the neglect of physical training, would, to a greater or less extent, ]>revail in schools in the best sanitary conditions in respect to ventilation, warmth, and light; but what are the common insanitary conditions of schools ?—often of the middle and higher, as well as of the lower class. What is their frequent sanitary aspect? The first introduction of the labouring man’s child to scdiool in toAvns is thus described in the report of the Rev. J. P. Norris, one of Her Majesty’s school inspectors: “At eighteen months or two years old ho is sent to one of the dames who gain a livelihood l)y taking care of young children whose mothers are at Ihe factory. Here, from seven in the morning to eight or nine at night, he is stowed away iu a small close room, without exercise or change of air.
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