The present position of state medicine in England : being an address delivered before the British Medical Association at the Owens College, Manchester, on August 7, 1877 / by Arthur Ransome.

  • Arthur Ransome
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The present position of state medicine in England : being an address delivered before the British Medical Association at the Owens College, Manchester, on August 7, 1877 / by Arthur Ransome. 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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    It appears to have been forgotten that most of the evils that we deplore in our town populations, the diseases and feebleness of constitution from which they suffer, are the direct outcome of the unhealthy circumstances in which they live. If the conditions of existence in towns remain as they now are—if the fever nests, the breeding places of scrofula and consumption, the temptations to intemperance and vice, are left unchecked to do their malignant work, then indeed we may certainly look for deterioration of race. But sanitarians will not he responsible for the result. Without in any way undervaluing the importance cf the subject of overcrowding, yet as a medical man I protest energetically to its being brought forward as it has been in these discourses. It is only too certain that we shall from time to time have to deal with the results of over-crowding, and to do our best to diminish infant mortality; but I submit that the control of the growth of the population is in no way our concern, as guardians of the public health. It will be the first duty of statesmen to consider how best to deal with the augmenting masses of people collected together in our towns, to favour movements of the population, to promote emigration, to remove restrictions on trades, and to give no encouragement to improvident marriages by an injudicious system of poor-law relief—but these are simply our duty as citizens, not as medical men ; and even if it were desirable we can see plainly enough, that no efforts of ours will avail to check the natural expansion of the nation. The increase of the population in geometrical progres- sion has, as Dr. Farr has shown, nothing “ fatal or inexorable ” about it. At any time it may become a decrease in geometrical progression in certain groups of
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