Francis Stephen Bennet François de Chaumont

“ Although there are many names I might refer to as great writers in hygiene, abroad as well as at home, there is one which we can not omit in a lecture like this, more especially as it is the first delivered in this museum which has been founded to his memory. Edmund Alexander Parkes did more than any other one man in this or any age to make hygiene a positive fact, a practical science, based upon not only philosophical conceptions but actual experiment. ”

“ We look, therefore, anxiously toward the pathological investigations of the time, and we deeply deplore the well-meaning but misguided zeal which is at present placing such grave obstacles in the way of the only means by which true science can advance—namely, direct experiment. ”

“ In the present century we have to point to the establishment of the fact of the water-carriage of disease, with which the name of Snow is so honorably associated, the differentiation of continued fevers by Stewart and Jenner, and their connection with the poison of infected excreta by the labors of Budd and other eminent men. To those we must add the elaborate investigations into the modes of propagation of cholera, dysentery, and other tropical diseases, and the means by which scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc., are carried from place to place by various channels of communication. ”

“ The part which the public services, such as the army and navy, played in the progress of hygiene was very important, as might indeed be expected; for under no other circumstances could bodies of men be so well observed, and the effects of surroundings and conditions upon health noted. ”

“ No inquiry can assume a scientific form unless it has a numerical basis to work upon, and therefore it behooves us to note the starting-point of such a basis in hygiene, if we can find it. This we do find in the collection of statistics, a beginning of which was made a long time ago in the bills of mortality kept in this country. We know how imperfect those were, and how even the population of this country was not correctly known until within the lifetime of men still living. ”

“ It is true we have still yellow fever to combat, but we know now much better how to deal with it when it does come, and how to obviate its invasion when it is threatened. The army medical statistics are continued now yearly, but it is a matter of regret that they have been allowed to be published in so abstract and undetailed a shape as to deprive them of much of their utility. ”

“ The truth of that is to be seen now when life in the West Indies is actually healthier, especially for young soldiers, than service at home, whereas sixty years ago a tour of service there was looked upon as almost a sentence of death. ”

“ No one in the present day can form any idea of the ravages that terrible disease produced. All long voyages were imperiled by it, while the very existence of England depended upon her fleet, which had frequently to return to port absolutely crippled with scurvy, in some cases as many as ten thousand men being landed from the Channel fleet helpless. ”

“ It showed also that it was possible for men of temperate habits and in hygienic conditions to live and thrive in the tropics, while the death and sickness that were unfortunately so common were due much more to the ignorance and folly of man than the influence of climate in any form. ”

“ IT is a little difficult in a necessarily restricted lecture to convey any exact idea of the way in which modern hygiene became formulated into so much of a science as it can at present lay claim to; but I will attempt to make a brief sketch of its more salient points. In the eighteenth century there were several important questions inquired into, and to a large extent solved, of which the chief were—1. The influence of air as a factor in the spread of disease ”