The case for a Ministry of Health / by Fred Scott.

  • Scott, Fred.
Date:
[1903]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The case for a Ministry of Health / by Fred Scott. 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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    to the Colonies as our only hope for the maintenance of our place amongst the nations. “ England would pour out amongst them year after year those poor children of hers, now choking in fetid alleys, and, relieved of the strain, breathe again fresh air into her own smoke-encrusted lungs. ... By and by they would return the sap which they were gathering into the heart.” A. highly apropos comment on this utterance is contained in a lecture delivered for the Edinburgh Health Society by the eminent sanitarian, Dr. James B. Russell, late Medical Officer of Health for Glasgow. He said: “ I appeal to the democracy. Do not abandon our cities to this black future. How can England O ever be ‘ Queen among the nations, from without invulnerable, and at peace and at health within,’ if the old heart of the nation beats slower from year to year in an island which is gradually being petrified into cities, in which children die or grow up into ‘ dead sea apes ’ 1 By all means incorporate the Colonies, but not as healthy limbs to a decaying body. Never will it be truer that the voice of the people is the voice of God than when that voice says ‘ Let there be light ’ in those ‘ fetid alleys,’ where Mr. Froude says, and says truly, ‘ with no sign of a green field, with no knowledge of flowers or forest, the blue heavens them- selves dirtied with soot'—amid objects all mean and hideous, with no entertainment but the music hall, no pleasui-e but in the drink shop—hundreds of thousands of English children are now growing up into men and women. Only say the word, and the light will come.’ ” The late Begistrar-General and eminent Vital Statistician, Dr. Farr, in the supplement to the 35th Annual Report of his Department, wrote as follows: “ The hygienic problem is how to free the English people from hereditary consumption, cancer, syphilis, gout, hereditary insanity, hereditary vagrancy, here- ditary criminality, and to develop in the mass the athletic, intel- lectual, aesthetic, moral, and i-eligious qualities, which have already distinguished some of the bi-eed. There is a Divine Image in the future to which the nation must aspire. The first step towards it is to improve the health of the present generation :