Licence: In copyright
Credit: The housing of the poor : a lecture / by Peter Fyfe. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
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![like this. Your head and your heart seem to, come into violent collision. We are told by Bailey, the poet, that “ We should count time by heart-throbs.” According to this chronology I admit to being an old man. The sights I have seen during the past fifteen years, the words I have heard, and the things I have handled, make the heart sore. It is down in the lanes and back lands of a large city one comes into immediate personal contact with “the fretful stir unprofitable, and the fever of the world,” and the intellectual part of a man seeks, like Mrs. Greville, to utter a “ prayer for indifference.” The heart rises in rebellion as scene after scene of poverty and wretchedness follow upon the opening of door after door; it seeks, with indignation and sorrow, for some immediate salvation—for the sudden intervention of some deliverer, almighty to save; but the head points out how impracticable it is to dream of any rapid solution of the awful problem. The heart is torn by the realisation of the sad effects of ignorance, vice, and ]Doverty, and the brain calmly seeks for the causes which produce them, and, in the cool light of reason, reflects upon the remedies to be taken. The heart impels you to become a modern Peter the Hermit, and call with a loud voice for a great general rising of Christian Crusaders to sweep from the city every condition which debases and destroys, no matter what interest may suffer during the battle. The head says, “ No ! we must work at our statistics, deliver lectures, write sanitaiy reports, think out schemes of gradual amelioration, issue notices and summonses, and condemn only those insanitary dwellings which are of such an aggravated character as to be quite intolerable.” The head recognises the hard, unbending facts which surround the financial aspect, while the heart deplores the necessity for giving heed to the pounds, shillings, and pence of the subject. It does not take long for any one moving out and in i among the poor to note that gross ignorance on their part plays an all-important part in the causation of disease and death among them. This lies on the very surface, jjatent to](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24765880_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
