The Sanitary Evolution of LondonJephson, Henry (Henry Lorenzo)
History
The Sanitary Evolution of London
Jephson, Henry (Henry Lorenzo)
Public health -- England -- London
"It is no uncommon thing, in a room twelve feet square or less, to find
three or four families styed together (perhaps with infectious disease
among them), filling the same space night and day--men, women, and
children, in the promiscuous intercourse of cattle. Of these inmates
it is nearly superfluous to observe that in all offices of nature they
are gregarious and public; that every instinct of personal or sexual
decency is stifled; that every nakedness of life is uncovered there....
Who can wonder at what becomes, physically and morally, of infants
begotten and born in these bestial crowds?..."
Of overcrowding or "pestilential heaping of human beings," this matter
of "infinite importance," he wrote:--
"While it maintains physical filth that is indescribable, while it
perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, while it creates mortality
enough to mask the results of all your sanitary progress, its moral
consequences are too dreadful to be detailed."
Pursuing his masterly analysis of the sanitary condition of the people
in the "City" and its causes, he wrote:--
"Last and not least among the influences prejudicial to health in
the City, as elsewhere, must be reckoned the social condition of the
working classes.... Often in discussion of sanitary subjects before
your Honourable Court, the filthy, or slovenly, or improvident, or
destructive, or intemperate, or dishonest habits of these classes are
cited as an explanation of the inefficiency of measures designed for
their advantage. It is constantly urged that to bring improved domestic
arrangements within the reach of such persons is a waste and a folly.
"It is unquestionable that in houses containing all the sanitary
evils enumerated--undrained and waterless, and unventilated--there do
dwell whole hordes of persons who struggle so little in self-defence
against that which surrounds them that they may be considered almost
indifferent to its existence, or almost acclimated to endure its
continuance.
"It is too true that among the lower classes there are swarms of
men and women who have yet to learn that human beings should dwell
differently from cattle--swarms to whom personal cleanliness is utterly
unknown; swarms by whom delicacy and decency in their social relations
are quite unconceived.
"My sphere of duty lies within the City boundary.
"I studiously refrain from instituting comparisons with other
metropolitan localities.
* * * * *
"I feel the deepest conviction that no sanitary system can be adequate
to the requirements of the time, or can cure those radical evils
which infest the under framework of society, unless the importance be
distinctly recognised and the duty manfully undertaken of improving the
social condition of the poor....
"Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten
by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the
heart of society often appears to discard?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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