English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon.
- John Simon
- Date:
- 1897
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![favoured centres may have done so without interruption, it Chap. i. would seem that aggregations of mankind in quantity and Times strength enough to leave social mark may have been but com- paratively recent phenomena in the developmental progress of our race. Within that nebula of times which human records do not First evi- pretend to reach, and on which science can only speculate in co-opera- terms of the widest generality, the social institutions which j^^.* eventually emerged into history began their embryonic exist- ence ; and for reasons which have been stated it would seem that, among such beginnings, one of the earliest to assume defi- nite form must have been the conspiration of aggregated men to amend, in the circumstances common to them, the conditions which they found dangerous to their lives. The first heroes in that defensive strategy (like most other first heroes) are uncom- memorated. As the historian of the art of war, when his re- searches have reached back to a certain remoteness of antiquity, has to admit, with Horace and Byron, that brave men were living before Agamemnon, so, in the archeeology of our subject- matter, it must be admitted that Social Acts of Sanitary Self- defence are of older date even than .ZEsculapius. Not with record of the first movements of organising process, nor with power to perpetuate the names of first organisers, but with silent vitality towards times to come, social institutions began their destined growth; and when at last they became defined enough for history, their stage of incipiency had become myth. They appear to us with a sort of abruptness. Human life is already far away from its rudiments. Men have long since come to live numerously together in places of fixed residence, and have learnt that in such circumstances they must regard certain of their physical requirements as interests of joint concern, to be * [In the above and the next following pages, where mention is made of the beginnings of conjoint human effort in the matters to which the volume relates, I refer in part to the Ethics of Early Man; but I should exceed my immediate purpose if I entered here at length on that subject; and instead of doing so, I may state that I have given separate discussion to the early moral relations of man in a paper which I contributed in April 1894 to No. 206 of the Nineteenth Century, and which paper I am permitted to subjoin as Appendix No. 1.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21077927_0029.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
