unchecked progress of death by poison rather than | him to overprove his case. Thus he commences by natural disease. wrong. In these remarks we have no desire to derogate from what has been done in former years, but to exclaim against official indifference at the last year's alarming retrogress of health. The history of former and earlier years, from the first organisation of their board, will convince any person who has patience to make the research that the increased mortality of London has never so much depended on increase of population as it has on sanitary neglect; and that, under sanitary exertions, the largest diminution of it has occurred under the greatest increase of population. Can we forget that when the census of London the less stood at 1,594,890, the annual mortality of 1837-38 presented (independently of the cholera of 1832) 53,597? As the present year, 1852, by announcing 1,297 deaths; No new natural epidemic was ever recorded in the and not content to deduce in his own way an annals of medicine as having dogged the steps of the agreement in amount with the corrected average, victims, like the hound that never quits the scent, he adds, moreover, by way of clinching his with the silent but sure increase of pace from year to assertion, that he has included various deaths in year, and with the invariable uniformity observable which coroners held inquests, which properly bein London blood-taint. Every novice of our acade-long to previous weeks, as if such additional mies reads in the works of the fathers of medicine numbers did not usually come in at the first week that it is the Protean changes of natural epidemics, of the year. Supposing his second view to be their inflections, their chameleon-like transitions, correct, then his average is If the average both as to symptoms and degree of admissibility be correct, the sentence which follows is a mere of cure, that constitutes their greatest difficulty. delusion. Let the reader refer to the first week of Such is the characteristic of natural disease. But the previous year, and he will find the same inquestarsenic, mephitic gases, and all other poisons, ever items, and let him recollect that the comparison have acted, and ever will act, in the ratio of dose and average is upon the first inquest-items-inand resisting power of the body corporate, the cluding weeks of ten years. Thus he will discover same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Infinites- the value and object of this supplementary official imal doses will purge, gripe, taint the blood and remark. destroy life. This is the grand test whereby natural disease may be distinguished from death by poison. The evil cannot be rectified by the course taken by our Registrar-General in 1851. In vain will he augment his allowance for increase of population. In vain, after wriggling with slow increments, will he boldly approach to a duplication of his figures for allowance for increase of population, as he has done only within a time very recent. The laudable object of these changes, to show an average decrease, still escapes his grasp, as if to mock his pursuit. It will be a source of melancholy amusement to pursue him in his awkward attempts to put the best face upon growing disease during the Exhibition year. After giving twenty-seven unfavourable weekly returns ex-suming the rate of mortality of earlier periods pressive of his regret, surprise and alarm; in his twenty-eighth (July 12) he takes courage and announces a favourable aspect; in his twenty-ninth, again raising his allowance for increase of population, he again finds material on which to repeat his favourable opinion. Here ends his fortnight's triumph. The Chairman of the Board of Health was then told what was seen clearly, that these two To use their own words, "The metropolis has weeks were the weeks of natural transition, agree-in itself all the elements of a healthy city. If the ably with a law of epidemics well understood. Accordingly, out comes his return for July 26, and with it an increase of mortality from 873 to 956, and onward flowed the tide of death till the next weeks of transition, which began in the week ending November 1; although it will be seen that by increasing his figure for supposed increases of population, just in proportion as town had become empty, he tries to anticipate nature by several weeks. Again he has his fortnight's period of transition and rests. Again he congratulates his readers; but on the 15th of November he is again compelled to announce a sudden and formidable increase, which week by week maintains the character for the remainder of the year, and will go on maintaining it. Now this is pitiful, and the more so from men who have the presumption to criticise Sydenham, a perusal of whose pages would save then for the future from such humiliation. The reader, if conversant with the nature and spirit of evidence, will observe a feverish * He does not tell his readers, what his table will show, that anxiety in the reports (amiable perhaps), inducing he has struck out the lightest year from his decennial average before and in the infancy of the existence of the Board of Health, with such a corrected average for increase as that adopted by our Registrar, the mortality of London ought to be 70,000 a-year. If such a system of altering their scale for increase, almost to a duplex, be their only remedy, God help the inhabitants of London! tides leave the banks of the Thames exposed, that great river sweeps through the city from west to east, and the winds rush fresh over its waters. The land rises in undulations to Hampstead-heath and the Surrey hills; PURE water is abundant (?), and would flow under almost every street; the artificial heat and gas, noisome as it sometimes is, ascends in a vast column to the sky, and is replaced by under-currents from the surrounding country. Their wealth enables the citizens to take advantage of all the suggestions, discoveries and resources of modern science; so that the metropolis need neither be fatal to so large a portion of its inhabitants, nor undermine or damage the health of those who are collected every year within its circuit." (Vide Hare's Letter in the Second Annual Report of the Registrar-General, 1840.) So far as Nature's bounty is concerned, all he says is true; but as to the purity of the water, or the successful riddance of the gas, or any confidence in the wealthy of the eliminating factors, nor constrained to act upon metropolis being able, even, if willing, "to secure their will to our own destruction, contra bonos the discoveries and resources of modern science," mores. The Registrar-General may get used to &c. &c., credat qui vult. When our sanitarian officer wrote thus, all to him appeared couleur de rose. Newly-installed and newly-salaried, he had no gloomy reflections that it is to the wealthy projectors and manufacturers, in a word to the marriage of enormous wealth to that productive but mischievous bride, that artful hand-maiden, Modern Chemistry, that we owe more than half the mischief. The reporter seems to have been enjoying that félicité parfaite, rudely but frankly expressed in the happy man's song: The smoke is good, and the gas is good, Parody on Old Song. When we read his eulogium we are tempted to exclaim, By Heaven! we have deceived ourselves this livelong time! We had thought that in our long experience of external agents on the body-corporate, we could recollect public wells tainted by the gas-ourselves, for example, insisting upon the poisonous character of that which erst graced the foot of the statue at Charing-cross, and to the south of that statue, where it is seen no more; for the once-celebrated pump is removed and replaced by one at the north. We thought we could recollect, whenever we have examined the disturbed earth of the streets, finding it uniformly saturated with street gas! and year after year we thought we had heard complaints in the suburbs, of roads noisome with it, of ornamental plantations destroyed by it, of pipes, when replaced by those of larger calibre to meet increased demand, being a cause, inter alia, of local outbreaks of flux and cholera. We had thought that our own well at our suburban residence, and several public wells founded by charity, had been thus tainted, and that there existed irrefragable proofs that the London street surface is one mass of poisonous earth. "That great river, too, that sweeps through the city from west to east, with the wind rushing fresh over its waters," we thought it had smelt of rotten eggs; and for the abundant supply of pure water-how this world is given to error! The cels were said to get used to being skinned, and the apprehensions here expressed in the Registrar-General's Report, in a sickly year, indeed, but yet at a time when by all the three forms of blood-taint, London folk only died at the rate of ten a week, the year round, are converted, as the gentleman grows older and less sensitive, to a serene satisfaction in the year 1851; when, from their own figures, as here shown, the destruction by London poisons, independently of natural disease, amounts to 5000 deaths per annum, or about 100 per week, to say nothing of the other thousands, whose health being undermined become less able to resist the various maladies which flesh is heir to. The ordinary ills are bad enough; but we, no more than legitimate heirs, are bound to accept and act upon the fatal legacies of jobbing companies and smoke-and-filth it, and so may the Board of Health; but we will tell them it were better for society if both boards, instead of singing their own pæans, and magnifying the superiority of numerical arguments over Sydenham's natural method, would first learn the laws of epidemics, as inferable from that great authority. It would enable them to see a little further than a fortnight, as it enabled one to tell their noble chairman, at the carlier part of the year, that flux-disease would necessarily be severe; and the deaths rose one-fourth accordingly, by the bowel-flux alone, on the yearly aggregate amount of 1851, compared with that of 1850. The law was extracted and supplied, and a pledge given for the result. Lord Seymour and Professor Owen, an ex-Commissioner of Health, have the vouchers. These laws have for years been before the scientific world, and we know that not one has ever yet been disproved. We extract a paragraph from that code as being illustrative and instructive of the nature of London blood-taint flux: The atmosphere of organic matter thrown off insensibly by every population, more or less dense as a district may be more or less open or close, and rendered more poisonous by the exhalation from common sewers, churchyards, tion, &c. &c., all commingling therein, may be sufficient vaults, slaughter-houses, cesspools, factories, gas-illuminato impress destructive force on the living, so as to receive and impart the processes of reaction in the zymotic principles necessary to the spread of typhus fever; but it is insufficient to develope epidemical disease, unless aided by have been traced. that epidemic influence to which all progressive epidemics In the capricious visits of an exotic, as in sweatingsickness, the earlier visitations may prove fatal to the poor: in the latter the poor shall escape altogether, and the highest classes shall be the victims. Thus in the three first visits of the sweating-sickness the rich escapel; in the fourth they began to suffer; in the fifth severely; and in the sixth extensively and exclusively, the poor escaping universally. So, in our own time, this capricious character The Irish typhus, a of new epidemics is still preserved. years limited to the poor; but in the progression of its new epidemic, which first appeared in 1816, was for many unhappy naturalisation it has found its way to the upper classes, and when contagiously introduced among their families it is growing proportionably more fatal to them than to the poor themselves.* As in common poisons some, as for example tobacco, hydrocyanic acid, foxglove, er the ancient state poison of Athens, subdue and extinguish the powers of life without exciting reaction; others equally fatal excite violent inflammate, arsenic, cantharides; so it is with atmospheric matory reaction and excessive heat; as corrosive sublipoisons developed by chemical and epidemical forces in manufacturing towns-some relaxing and prostrating effects on the nerves and tissues, as cholera superadded on London blood-taint, others for mations, as plague; and some forces also, like common rapidly developing violent, active, and destructive inflampoisons, produce mixed effects, as that of violent influenza. are remarkable for their Reference to the registry of disease all over the world, just as special reference to the registry of disease in Great all our possessions, will show that bowel-flux when epiBritain, and to our army and navy medical returns from demic arrests catarrh; and, vice versa, the number of cases The mortality (according to a Government report) has been much greater among the higher ranks of society whom the disease and other attendants, as well as the clergy, have felt its destructive has attacked, than in the labouring-class es; and the physicians force in much more than an ordinary proportion. of catarrh or bronchitis will gradually ascend in an exact ratio with the descent of bowel-flux. In all epidemics, ordinary and extraordinary, naturalised and exotic, in proportion as the forces relax the bowels they will manifest less energetic action on the skin and on the air-passages; not excepting the poisonous epidemic forces of smallpox, for this last has at one time manifested its influence by inducing all ordinary febrile symptoms, except the eruption, for which in 1668 a diarrhoea or spontaneous salivation was substituted. This explains why, in Asiatic cholera superadded upon its ally epidemic diarrhoea, the fever of reaction is languid and indistinct.-From "The Laws of Epidemics, or Code of Safety, by G. F. Collier, M.D." It is but reasonable that as we have spoken so freely of the extent of a great social evil, and of the reprehensible listlessness with which it is allowed to spread, that we should be prepared with hints for the correction and remedy. We will do this with the confidence and facility that can only result from long acquaintance with the subject in all its bearings. We speak with the ease of an emeritus professor. Happy the Government, if they will listen and receive knowledge. Thus, if we had their ear, we would address them: My lords and gentlemen,-Thirty years ago not twenty people died annually of diarrhoea. Now, near 3000 die of it, not from natural disease, but undermined and poisoned. The appearance of a new epidemical disease in any country ought not to excite surprise; for good reasons were proferred by John Hunter, and by others after him, for believing that under the modifying force of epidemical influence new poisons are constantly produced among the poor of great cities. A collection of causes concurring produce malignant and fatally acute disease, simulating epidemical disease, without epidemical influence; but it is contrary to the experience of ages that such disease should permanently spread itself over a great extent of country, unless aided by meteorologic influence, and developed by the like combined poisonous forces. interment, and let the numerous places hitherto appropriated to that use be converted, after being treated with a stratum of quick-lime, into lawns, walks, gardens, squares, and such-like useful and ornamental objects; but by no means let them be built upon. Replace your foul street-earth with a more salubrious material. To supply the defect of burying-places, other grounds should be chosen, at proper distances, on the north side of a city, as southern winds are more sultry and likely to convey to the inhabitants any noxious exhalation; the diffusion of which, it is well known, northern winds tend rather to check than to promote. See that the increase of trade, and crowded assemblage consequent thereon, be allowed to produce the least possible damage, whether where merchants most do congregate or in the more fashionable atmosphere of a court. Control, as far as you can, the extent and impurities of illuminations and lighting; encourage early closing; supply an ædilian prosecutor to compete with the companies who saturate our street-soil and our wells with noisome gas- our water with organic debris. Lose no time in purifying our river; let the chemistry of manufacture be compelled to make obeisance to the Goddess of Health. Trust not the duties of an ædile to a mock analysing commission, with one commissioner doing his own duty, and secretary besides, at his own solitary board, not entirely useless under the premiership of Mr. Thomas Wakley, M.P. În short, neither let your army, nor your navy, nor the civil population, be poisoned with unwholesome food. Condescend to think for the many, and supply them with some guarantee that they be not dearly and generally supplied with unwholesome liquids. Bear in mind that tainted air is poisonous, as well as tainted food. Look to your hospitals, and to all your benevolent and parochial institutions, and see that they be not made hotThese poisonous forces have more than doubled beds of pest, as some of them are now, without since 1846, and they are undermining your manu- the slightest sanitary control, and with a mortality facturing population. The remedy is not in a of 130 per cent. Give the mechanics more room single panacea, but in the judicious use of the state for recreation; give them ball-courts to their Materia Medica. In 1776 the evil was anticipated baths and wash-houses; and do not be afraid of by Dr. Samuel Johnson, and his friend Dr. Brock- driving them mad, even if they have music and lesby. Even then (Vide Gentleman's Magazine reading-rooms there; it would be better for them and the Annual Register for 1776) the Govern- than the hot, reeking coffee-shops, where they ment of that time were told that they could not for seek relaxation, and more worthy of a great many years longer be allowed to remain blind to nation. In short, my lords and gentlemen, the evil, or deaf to an appeal for the remedy. We look to fire, earth, air and water. The first do but repeat the advice then given without any is hourly made an instrument for poisonous considerable enlargement or merit of our own. evolutions; the second is a mass, saturated with Create your proper ædilian officers, incorporate poison, which we daily tread upon; the third is their duties with those of the inspectors of build- tainted; and the fourth is corrupt. Learn that, ings of all kinds above and below the street earth, as twelve pence make a shilling, a sufficing as Greece and Rome did in their best times. Let all public buildings, whether for worship, amusement, or utility, be erected agreeably with the laws of health, and not at the lawless caprice of wealth or fanaticism. Abolish and prohibit all intramural number of causes create pest; and do not amuse and stultify the people with brass-farthing, abortive, and, because abortive, expensive attempts at sanitary legislation. Again we say, "it is the last key-stone that makes the arch." A WILLOW-BRANCH. a song of willow." "The spiuners and the knitters i' the sun, And the fond maids who weave with bones, Do use to chant it." "HARD heart! you feel it now!" All night, A plaint of Willow, sad and low; Then in the porch with leaves grown o'er, A world of flowers while there we dreamedThe summer eves were sweet no more. Through grove to grove, by wood and mead, O'er the vast desert turning back; My vows may cost me dearly yet, That once, within the sacred shrine My soul to death! Peace, Conscience !-peace! "Mary, beseech my pardon still!" Her trusting feet unwearied go, The wife-the new-made wife-is clad. I rose; a quiet in the air, The sober meekness of the dawn, Proclaimed another Sabbath mornA day of love, and rest, and prayer. And the thought stung me as as I rose, How oft my old love, fresh from sleep, Wondered how near she was to weep— For she had waked before her woesAnd said, "Whence is thus sullen pain?" And then the start, the fitful sigh, The gathering sorrow in her eye, When the old snake uncoiled again. Abroad! abroad! I needs must walk Where, rich in all the peerless wealth Of morning love enjoyed by stealth, We roamed-to wonder more than talk: In the vast quiet of content, With brimming hearts, with aimless feet, And loving eyes that feared to meetThe traitors were so eloquent! For Conscience never pleads so well As where we most were innocent: In heaven arch-devils might repent Who boast of blasphemy in hell. O Nature shall I never know What bonds are cast 'twixt thine and mine, Our souls, so trammelled yet divine, Thy summer leaves and winter snow? How lexicon the languages, That, half in love and half in fear, That, like a loud triumphal horn, Oh, like a sister good thou art, An elder sister, calm and wise, That search and shame the wayward heart: With strength upholding those who fall, The stream we sauntered oft along, What here, and here, and there was said; But recollections crowd too fast They dim mine eyes, they flood mine ears, And swift a spangled haze appears, And whelms me in the love-time past. Be still, poor heart!-thou canst not beat The measure of that happy laugh: Sweet ghost! mock not mine eyes, that half Believe they track her flying feet. And rob my memory no more For masques! Indeed I cannot spare And this the fragrance of her breath, Behold! a soft, autumnal breeze Is circling o'er the sleepy corn; It wreathes my head with halos cool, Rise, O baptismal waters! Roll Your soothing wavelets round my heart,' Anoint with patience all my thought, And make this halting spirit whole. For not in boughs of Indian palm, O gentle Wind! hadst thou thy birth; Nor otherwhere in all the earth, Except it be Jerusalem ! On passed the Wind, with robe outspread It fills the homes of great and small, And I, too, from this haunted ground, Where yet forbidden phantoms brood, Will turn my steps-with grief subdued, But still pervading and profound. Farewell, O sister eloquent! Ere next I dare to search thee out, I'll build this ruined heart about With walls of patience and content. And there my love in bonds I'll keep, Till, starved of thought, it die-and merge In those sad drops that o'er the verge Of memory trickle to the Deep. But count the hours, O happy wife! And count the weary, weary days, Before that dawn may break, whose rays Shall loose the frozen springs of life! And when, on thought-compelling eves, On watchful nights, you take the book Pass o'er those lines my follies stain |