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
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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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    than one-half, or within 12 in 1000. From common lodging houses, by the enforcement, through the police, of sanitary regulations, typlius and diarrho3a,as epidemics prevalent amongst the houses of the labour- ing classes, are banished. In our well-regulated district institutions for pauper children, those epidemic visitations which ravage the children of the families of working men are almost unknown, and the death rate is reduced to one-third of that prevailing amongst them. There are instances in proof of the assertion that it is possible to give the sanitary advantage to an urban over a rural district. Thus, Dr. Buchanan, the officer of health of St. Giles’s district, one of the woi’st in the metropolis, speaking of- one of the sub-districts there, states : “ This neighbourhood has had for the last three years an average mortality of 13’6 only per 1000. It is assumed by sanitary statisticians that 17 per 1000 is the inevitable death rate of a town population. Surely the standard is fixed too high, if a mixed com- munity of nearly 4000 persons in the centre of London incur no higher mortality than 13| per thousand.” In this I fully agree with him. As an earnest of what may be done by sanitary measures, I may state, that whereas formerly the general death rate in the army at home was 17'5 per 1000 per annum; in consequence of the labours of Miss Nightingale and others, such advances have been made in the application of sanitary science, that the mortality at Aldershott and Shorncliffe has been, on a three years’ average, reduced to 4*7 per thousand. This death rate realizes what I stated in my Report, in 1842, on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Popula- tion, that by a moderate application of the rudiments of sanitary science, soldiers in camps might be placed in higher sanitary condi- tions than those yet obtained by civic populations. And here they are so ; for the death rate, obtained in the camp, is only one-half of that of artisans of the same ages, in towns not in the worst sanitary conditions. If we call the difference between this improved death rate in the camp and the old rate, 12 per 1000, this, in an army of 80,000 men, amounts to a saving of 960 men, or an entire regiment per annum, and the saving of three regiments and more kept con- stantly sick and helpless in the hospitals, instead of in health and force for the field. We have as yet no data from India; but, if the Army Commission shall have done its duty, and if a reduction be made in the army mortality from 70 to 30 per annum only, we would save, on a force of 80,000 men, 3,200 recruits per annum. After all, however, some of the best sanitary standards of what may be done by comparatively inferior means, are the best constructed and best administered prisons in towns, where amongst those prisoners who enter in a fair average state of health there is almost an entire impunity from spontaneous disease, and a higher state of heailth is obtained than amongst equal numbers of town populations of the siune ages of iilmost any condition of life out of ])i'isou. If, for exanqile, the Giuirds, amongst whom there was ai death rate of 21 in 1000, could have been put into one of the best town judsous, though they veio “ massed together ” in as small a superficial area us most town popu-
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