Benjamin Ward Richardson

“ Thus we are led to feel this greater object: that to whatever extent we, by our exertions, confer benefits on those who live, we extend the advantage to those who have to live; that one good thought leading to practical useful action from one man or woman, may go to the virtue of thousands of generations; that one breath of health wafted by our breath may, in the aggregate of life saved by it, represent in its ultimate effect all the life that now is or has been. ”

“ During this comparatively brief period, the labour of which, until within a century, has had no systematic direction, the changes for good that have been effected are amongst the most startling of historical facts. Pestilences which decimated populations, and which, like the great plague of London, destroyed 7,165 people in a single week, have lost their virulency; gaol fever has disappeared, and our gaols, once each a plague-spot, have become, by a strange perversion of civilisation, the health spots of, at least, one kingdom. The term, Black Death, is heard no more ”

“ Suffice it if I have proved the general propositions, that disease is now as it was in the beginning, except that in some examples of it it is less virulent; that the science for extinguishing any one disease has yet to be learned; that, as the bases of disease exist, untouched by civilisation, so the danger of disease is ever imminent, unless we specially provide against it; that the development of disease may occur with original virulence and fatality, and may at any moment be made active under accidental or systematic ignorance. ”

“ There is nothing discoverable to us that would lead to the conception of a human civilisation extending back over two hundred generations; and when in these generations we survey the actual effect of civilisation, so fragmentary and overshadowed by persistent barbarism, in influencing disease and mortality, we are reduced to the observation of at most twelve generations, including our own, engaged, indirectly or directly, in the work of sanitary progress. ”

“ Here the insane live, in small communities, under proper medical supervision, with their own gardens and pastimes.
The houses of the helpless and aged are, like the asylums, the same as the houses of the rest of the town. No large building of pretentious style uprears itself for the poor; no men badged and badgered as paupers walk the place. Those poor who are really, from physical causes, unable to work, are maintained in a manner showing that they possess yet the dignity of human kind ”

“ Passing along the main streets of the city we see in twenty places, equally distant, a separate building surrounded by its own grounds,—a model hospital for the sick. To make these institutions the best of their kind, no expense is spared. Several elements contribute to their success. They are small, and are readily removable. The old idea of warehousing diseases on the largest possible scale, and of making it the boast of an institution that it contains so many hundred beds, is abandoned here. ”

“ It will be seen, from what has been already told, that in this our model city there are no underground cellars, kitchens, or other caves, which, worse than those ancient British caves that Nottingham still can show the antiquarian as the once fastnesses of her savage children, are even now the loathsome residences of many millions of our domestic and industrial classes. There is not permitted to be one room underground. The living part of every house begins on the level of the street. ”

“ Cholera, in its modern representation is more terrible a malady than its ancient type, in so far as we have knowledge of it from ancient learning. And that fearful scourge, the great plague of Constantinople, the plague of hallucination and convulsion which raged in the Fifth Century of our era, has in our time, under the new names of tetanoid fever and cerebro-spinal meningitis, been met with here and in France, and in Massachusetts has, in the year 1873, laid 747 victims in the dust. ”

“ The most radical changes in the houses of our city are in the chimneys, the roofs, the kitchens, and their adjoining offices. The chimneys, arranged after the manner proposed by Mr. Spencer Wells, are all connected with central shafts, into which the smoke is drawn, and, after being passed through a gas furnace to destroy the free carbon, is discharged colourless into the open air. The city, therefore, at the expense of a small smoke rate, is free of raised chimneys and of the intolerable nuisance of smoke. The roofs of the houses are but slightly arched, and are indeed all but flat. ”

“ The accumulation of mud and dirt in the streets is washed away every day through side openings into the subways, and is conveyed, with the sewage, to a destination apart from the city. Thus the streets everywhere are dry and clean, free alike of holes and open drains. Gutter children are an impossibility in a place where there are no gutters for their innocent delectation. Instead of the gutter, the poorest child has the garden ”

“ I think it probable the city would come in the manner described, but how long it would be coming is hard to say, for whatever great results have followed civilisation, the most that has occurred has been an unexpected, unexplained, and therefore uncertain arrest of the spread of the grand physical scourges of mankind. The phenomena have been suppressed, but the root of not one of them has been touched. Still in our midst are thousands of enfeebled human organisms which only are comparable with the savage. ”

“ The rest, those who can work, are employed in useful labours, which pay for their board. If they cannot find work, and are deserving, they may lodge in the house and earn their subsistence; or they may live from the house and receive pay for work done. If they will not work, they, as vagrants, find a home in prison, where they are compelled to share the common lot of mankind.
Our model city is of course well furnished with baths, swimming baths, Turkish baths, playgrounds, gymnasia, libraries, board schools, fine-art schools, lecture halls, and places of instructive amusement. ”

“ Side by side with these facts of the statist we detect other facts which show that in the progress of civilisation the actual organic strength and build of the man and woman increases. As in the highest developments of the fine arts the sculptor and painter place before us the finest imaginative types of strength, grace, and beauty, so the silent artist, civilisation, approaches nearer and nearer to perfection, and by evolution of form and mind developes what is practically a new order of physical and mental build. ”

“ That this is a common cause of disease is well understood. I have myself seen the half-made riding-habit that was ultimately to clothe some wealthy damsel rejoicing in her morning ride act as the coverlet of a poor tailor's child stricken with malignant scarlet fever. These things must be, in the ordinary course of events under our present bad sanitary system. In the model city we have in our mind's eye, these dangers are met by the simple provision of workmen's offices or workrooms. ”

“ Utopia itself is but another word for time; and some day the masses, who now heed us not, or smile incredulously at our proceedings, will awake to our conceptions. Then our knowledge, like light rapidly conveyed from one torch to another, will bury us in its brightness. ”

“ Two trained nurses attend to each corridor, and connected with the hospital is a school for nurses, under the direction of the medical superintendent and the matron. From this school, nurses are provided for the town; they are not merely efficient for any duty in the vocation in which they are always engaged, either within the hospital or out of it, but from the care with which they attend to their own personal cleanliness, and the plan they pursue of changing every garment on leaving an infectious case, they fail to be the bearers of any communicable disease. ”

“ At the close of a Parliamentary session, an uneventful leader of a section of Parliament banters his more eventful rival, and enlivening his criticism by a sneer at our Congress, challenges the contempt of his rival, as if to draw it forth in the same critical direction. Alas! it is too true that great congresses, like great men, and even like Parliaments, do live sometimes for many years and talk much, and seem to miss much and advance little ”

“ As we walk the streets of our model city, we notice an absence of places for the public sale of spirituous liquors. Whether this be a voluntary purgation in goodly imitation of the National Temperance League, the effect of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's Permissive Bill and most permissive wit and wisdom, or the work of the Good Templars, we need not stay to inquire. We look at the fact only. ”

“ For anything the healthy householder knows, the clothes he and his children wear have been mixed before, during, and after the process of washing, with the clothes that have come from the bed or the body of some sufferer from a contagious malady. Some of the most fatal outbreaks of disease I have met with have been communicated in this manner. In our model community this danger is entirely avoided by the establishment of public laundries, under municipal direction. No person is obliged to send any article of clothing to be washed at the public laundry ”

“ No malady, once originated, has ever actually died out; many remain as potent as ever. That wasting fatal scourge, pulmonary consumption, is the same in character as when Coelius Aurelianus gave it description. The cancer of to-day is the cancer known to Paulus Eginæta. The Black Death, though its name is gone, lingers in malignant typhus. The great plague of Athens is the modern great plague of England, scarlet fever. ”

“ From the study of the past we are warranted, then, in assuming that civilisation, unaided by special scientific knowledge, reduces disease and lessens mortality, and that the hope of doing still more by systematic scientific art is fully justified. ”

“ The houses being built on arched subways, great convenience exists for conveying sewage from, and for conducting water and gas into, the different domiciles. All pipes are conveyed along the subways, and enter each house from beneath. Thus the mains of the water pipe and the mains of the gas are within instant control on the first floor of the building, and a leakage from either can be immediately prevented. The officers who supply the commodities of gas and water have admission to the subways, and find it most easy and economical to keep all that is under their charge in perfect repair. ”

“ In a city from which that grand source of wild mirth, hopeless sorrow and confirmed madness, alcohol, has been expelled, it could hardly be expected that much insanity would be found. The few who are insane are placed in houses licensed as asylums, but not different in appearance to other houses in the city. ”

“ The old idea of building an institution so that it shall stand for centuries, like a Norman castle, but, unlike the castle, still retain its original character as a shelter for the afflicted, is abandoned here. The still more absurd idea of building hospitals for the treatment of special organs of the body, as if the different organs could walk out of the body and present themselves for treatment, is also abandoned. ”

“ The safety of the population of the city is provided for against density by the character of the houses, which ensures an equal distribution of the population. Tall houses overshadowing the streets, and creating necessity for one entrance to several tenements, are nowhere permitted. In streets devoted to business, where the tradespeople require a place of mart or shop, the houses are four stories high, and in some of the western streets where the houses are separate, three and four storied buildings are erected ”

“ The stalwart Englishman of to-day can neither get into the armour nor be placed in the sarcophagus of those sons of men who were accounted the heroes of the infantile life of the human world.
We discover, moreover, from our view of the past, that the developments of tenacity of life and of vital power have been comparatively rapid in their course when they have once commenced. ”

“ The medical officers attached to the hospital in our model city are allowed to hold but one appointment at the same time, and that for a limited period. Thus every medical man in the city obtains the equal advantage of hospital practice, and the value of the best medical and surgical skill is fairly equalised through the whole community.
In addition to the hospital building is a separate block, furnished with wards, constructed in the same way as the general wards, for the reception of children suffering from any of the infectious diseases. ”

“ The existing calendar of diseases, studied in connection with the classical history of the diseases written for us by the longest unbroken line of authorities in the world of letters, shows, in unmistakable language, that the imposition of every known malady of man is coeval with every phase of his recorded life on the planet. ”

“ The corridor on each side is a framework of walls of glazed brick, arched over head, and divided into six segments. In each segment is a separate, light, elegant removable ward, constructed of glass and iron, twelve feet high, fourteen feet long, and ten feet wide. The cubic capacity of each ward is 1,680 feet. Every patient who is ill enough to require constant attendance has one of these wards entirely to himself, so that the injurious influences on the sick, which are created by mixing up, in one large room, the living and the dying ”

“ Whatever disadvantages might spring in other places from a retention of water on a clay soil, is here met by the plan that is universally followed, of building every house on arches of solid brickwork. So, where in other towns there are areas, and kitchens, and servants' offices, there are here subways through which the air flows freely, and down the inclines of which all currents of water are carried away. ”