The life and doctrine of Sir Edwin Chadwick / by Sir William Job Collins.

  • William Job Collins
Date:
[1924?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life and doctrine of Sir Edwin Chadwick / by Sir William Job Collins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    superior self-government over that which now exists a true representa- tion of the best local intelligence under unity in the place of disunity and local ignorance.”’ He repudiated the soft impeachment of being a benevolent despot ;. if he aimed at centralisation as against the corrupt and inefficient local self-government he had encountered, it was, he said, ‘‘ centralisation for the protection of hberty . . . .’’? If he condemned the laissez faire doctrine of those who claimed liberty for themselves and denied it to others it was because he held ‘‘ Liberty is a right with a corresponding, obligation to respect it. Liberty consists of the power of doing any- thing which does not hurt another.’’ Looking back from 1885 to his old battles of the ’forties and ’ fifties, he reflects with sorrow rather than with anger or resentment on the ‘vote obtained under the combination of interests’’ which killed the General Board of Health, and sent him into a premature pensioned retirement. He recalls ‘‘ the continued serious contraventions, which I was unable to withstand, of principles which were not understood,’’ and how despite the ‘‘ vexations and obstructions of half-knowledge,’’ he had felt ‘‘ constrained to go on’’ ‘‘for the sake of the gain to be obtained by other men after my time,’’ and he added, ‘‘I do not regret.”’ His Friends and Co-workers. If Chadwick had many enemies, whose names are mostly forgotten, he had also some devoted friends and coadjutors whose services to man- kind are gratefully remembered. Let us recall some of these, who accepted the Chadwick school of thought and lent their invaluable support to the reforms he urged so insistently, often on deaf ears and shut imaginations. I have already alluded incidentally to some of them. Dr. Southwood Smith (1788-1861) was a man after Chadwick’s own heart. Born in 1788, at first a Unitarian minister teaching a universalist doctine in Edinburgh, he later graduated M.D. at that University. From 1824 to 1839, physician to the London Fever Hospital, spoke with authority on infectious diseases. If he were open to Simon’s charge of ‘‘ immensely under-rating the independent importance of morbid contagia,’’ he displayed ‘‘ a perfectly proper zeal against filth.’’ He wrote and spoke with equal felicity, was an excellent anatomist, and I have already referred to his services to his master Bentham both before and after the latter’s demise. He was the author of ‘‘ The Philosophy of Health’’ and “‘ Illustrations of the Divine Government,’’ and contri- buted much of the distinctively medical portions of Chadwick’s reports. Dr. Wiliam Farr was born in 1807 and died in 1883. It is not without interest to note that the combined ages of Farr, Southwood Smith, and Chadwick spanned nearly two and a half centuries. Farr was described by those who knew him as ‘‘a man with the liveliest intelligence, with a mind revelling in generalisation, and a master of methods by which arithmetic is made argumentative.’?’ He made Descartes’ ‘‘ Discours de la Méthode ’’ his model. He recognised the hmitations as well as the virtues of statistics, and would not have disputed the epigram that while ‘“ figures cannot he, liars sometimes figure.’’ He was the first to essay lectures on hy giene, was a man of large and liberal views, a glutton for work, of great personal charm, and of genial disposition. Dr. Kay, afterwards Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877), wrote on the moral and physical condition of the working classes, studied
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