Gertrude Hill Lewes

“ How little can death itself appal his mind who feels that he is conducted to the tomb by the hand of the Sovereign of the universe! Yes! there is a reality in religion; and if that happiness, which is so often sought, and so often sought in vain—that happiness which is worthy of a rational being, and which at once satisfies and exalts him—be ever tasted upon earth, it is by him who thus, in the solitude of his heart, delights to contemplate the idea of a presiding Benignity, the extent of whose dominion is without limit, and the duration of whose kingdom is without end! ”

“ Sir,—Though personally a stranger, permit me to offer my sincere congratulations on your appointment by her Majesty's Government to the Board of Health, where the talents you have so long displayed will have scope for the full share of utility.
I have traced and followed you in the various publications issued by the Government and the Health of Towns Association for several years past, and having myself, though in a much more confined area, mingled with public life, I know the heart-burnings, the disappointments and annoyances, to which in such a course a man is necessarily exposed ”

“ From accurate calculations, based on the observation of carefully recorded facts, it is rendered certain that the annual slaughter in England alone by causes that are preventible, by causes that produce only one disease—namely, typhus fever—is more than double the loss sustained by the allied armies in the battle of Waterloo; that 136 persons perish every day in England alone whose lives might be saved; that in one single city—namely, Manchester—thirteen thousand three hundred and sixty-two children have perished in seven years over and above the mortality natural to mankind. ”

“ It is not easy to convince a whole nation of the truth of new principles, however closely they may in reality affect its welfare; not easy to produce a degree of conviction that shall lead to practical, tangible results. The early workers in the public movements, such as that for Sanitary Reform, have first to spread such a knowledge of existing evils as shall create a general feeling of the need for improvement. They have to educate the public until it believes in that need. ”

“ It was during these years that my grandfather conceived the idea that houses might be built from which fever could be banished even amongst the classes and in the districts in which up to that time disease had most fatally prevailed. If the experiment succeeded, and the amount of sickness and death were found to be markedly diminished, he felt that a very valuable practical illustration would be afforded of the truth of the principles he was advocating—of the law which connects bad sanitary conditions with disease. ”

“ My grandfather, however, who was brought daily face to face with the preventible suffering, was not likely to forget it, nor to relax his efforts. With the calm, persistent earnestness which was characteristic of him, he worked on and on. The more defeats, the more necessity for strenuous exertion.
Seeing the difficulty of obtaining any practical result from all the labour that had been devoted to the improvement of the health of the people, he now determined to try to bring together the distinguished men who had taken an interest in the cause, and who had exerted themselves to promote it. ”

“ In your workshops, in your clubs, in your institutes, obtain signatures to your petitions: get every labourer, every artisan, every tradesman whom you can influence, to sign petitions. Other things must also be done before your condition can be rendered prosperous; but this must precede every real improvement: the sources of the poison that infects the atmosphere you breathe must be dried up before you can be healthy, and uncleanliness must be removed from the exterior of your dwellings before you can find or make a Home.—I am your friend and servant,
Southwood Smith. ”

“ It is the universal possession of these noble faculties by the human race that makes the gift of human life alike a boon to all. It is the exercise of these noble faculties on objects appropriate to them, and worthy of them, that makes life a boon. It is because these faculties, when duly exercised and properly directed, strengthen and enlarge with time, that the value of life increases with its duration. In the mere possession of the full number of the years that make up the natural term of life there is a larger and higher boon than is apparent at first view. ”

“ Call upon the instructed and benevolent men in the legislative body to sustain your just claim to protection and assistance. Petition Parliament to give you sewers; petition Parliament to secure to you constant and abundant supplies of water—supplies adequate to the unintermitting and effectual cleansing both of your sewers and streets; petition Parliament to remove—for it is in the power of Parliament universally and completely to remove—the sources of poison that surround your dwellings, and that carry disease, suffering, and death into your homes. ”

“ If the house has more rooms, it probably contains many families, and a state of overcrowding is produced nearly as fatal as that which prevails in the parts of London where the houses stand more thickly.
The picture comes vividly before us of the dismal homes, with their melancholy gardens where the pale children play by the black ditches; their green damp walls ”

“ In the article by Dr Southwood Smith which first called public attention to these evils, he points out, in a very striking manner, the paramount necessity of a supply of subjects. He reminds his readers of the wild theories of former times when anatomical knowledge was not possessed, and enforces on their attention the fact that this knowledge can only be acquired, with any degree of perfection, by means of dissection. He further reminds them that no operation can be performed without torture to the living, and danger to life itself, by the hand of a surgeon unpractised in dissection ”

“ PREFACE. It is now nearly forty years since the death of my grandfather, Dr Southwood Smith, and with this distance of time lying between him and us, it may not be uninteresting to this generation to look back upon the origin of some of the great social reforms which have now reached such wide proportions, and to see these reforms as gathered round the life of a man who was in the forefront of the noble army which promoted them. ”

“ It seemed, moreover, that the interest of the poor specially demanded a widespread anatomical knowledge in medical men, since they, more than all others, suffered when the means of gaining it were limited. "Poverty, it is true," my grandfather writes, "is a misfortune; poverty, it is true, has terror and pain enough in itself. No legislature ought by any act to increase its wretchedness; but the measure here proposed is pregnant with good to the poor, and would tend, more than can be estimated, to lessen the misery of their condition. ”

“ My grandfather was of opinion that in every instance an attack of cholera is preceded by a period of a few days (sometimes only of a few hours) of premonitory symptoms, which, since they are painless, escape notice; and that, unless a specially appointed medical visitor goes round to the houses of the less educated to inquire, and almost to cross-question, as to the existence of these symptoms, and to treat the disease at once, this stage rapidly passes on into developed cholera, when recovery becomes all but hopeless. ”

“ Perhaps the most necessary and the most tried quality in a reformer is Patience. Notwithstanding the publication of the 'Treatise on Fever' in 1830, and the tribute paid by the scientific world to its masterly exposition of the treatment and causes of the disease, notwithstanding the constant and ardent endeavours of the author to propagate his views, yet seven long years passed away before he was able to awaken the apathy of the public and the authorities. ”

“ Let a voice come from your streets, lanes, alleys, courts, workshops, and houses that shall startle the ear of the public and command the attention of the Legislature. The time is auspicious for the effort; it is a case in which it is right that you should take a part, in which you are bound to take a part, in which your own interests and the wellbeing of those most dear to you require you to take a part. The Government is disposed to espouse your cause; but narrow, selfish, short-sighted interests will be banded against you. Petition both Houses of Parliament. ”

“ In order to emphasise this side of the truth my grandfather wrote as follows (and, though it may seem to require qualification, the general truth of his remark will be admitted by all) : "No fever produced by contamination of the air can be communicated to others in a pure air—there never was an instance of such communication."
The form of poison given off from a fever patient is, besides, not so much to be feared as other forms of that poison, because, though it is potent, it has not a wide range; when let out into the fresh air, it is so far diluted that its power is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ As I am recalling the various sources of comfort which came to my grandfather during these years at Weybridge, I must mention the great happiness which arose from the opening out of the lives of two of his granddaughters, Miranda and Octavia Hill; for it was at this time that they—at the ages of nineteen and sixteen—took the responsibilities of their lives upon themselves, and began the great and good works which they have since carried to such wide issues. ”

“ Poverty in her hut, covered with her rags, surrounded by her filth, striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates Nature but too successfully; the process and the product are the same, the only difference is in the magnitude of the result. Penury and ignorance can thus, at any time and in any place, create a mortal plague." [7]
Dr Southwood Smith has been accused of ignoring the fact that those suffering from fever can communicate the disease to others—of "infection," as it is called. ”

“ I have said that there is involved in the mere length of life a larger and higher boon than is apparent without reflection. First, because length of life is in general a tolerably accurate measure of the amount of health, without a good share of which life is comparatively worthless. The instances are rare in which a person attains to old age who has not enjoyed at least a moderate share of daily health and vigour. ”

“ Sanitary Law and Sanitary Inspection everywhere prevail, and the thousands of lives annually saved—the lowered death-rate both in town and country—attests the power of the laws he was one of the first to perceive and proclaim.
To show the saving of life in London alone, the death-rate in the early "forties" was 26 in the thousand, it is now 19; whilst in the Model Dwellings the improvement is even more striking, since there it is not more than half that of London at large. ”

“ Generalising, then, from the facts which such men had collected and from others observed by himself, Dr Southwood Smith endeavours to establish the laws of epidemic disease. In the first place, he labours to prove that epidemic diseases are not, in the strict sense of the word, contagious, and that the laws which epidemic diseases observe offer a complete contrast to those which regulate contagious diseases. ”

“ One was, that it was impossible to shorten their hours of work without also shortening those of the adults, who could not go on without them; the other, that it was wrong to restrict the liberty of the subject.
The first of these was, truly, a difficulty; but if the evil was so very great, it appeared to my grandfather and those acting with him that some change must be made in the mode of working, rather than overtax the children to this extent. Relays of children must be obtained, or grown-up workers must be substituted as assistants. ”

“ The press, not only in London but in all parts of England, took up the subject. Public men began to be roused.
At first the facts were doubted. It was difficult to believe that such a dreadful state of things could exist; but attention was awakened, and inquiry followed.
The Marquis of Normanby, then Secretary of State for the Home Department, was much impressed with what he had read, but he could hardly conquer a belief that there must have been some exaggeration. My grandfather took him to see some of the places in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel which the Report had described. ”

“ Your Lordship will remember how earnest I was in December last, on the publication of the Bishop of London's Pastoral Letter, that we should at once avail ourselves of the power of the Contagious Diseases Act; as well to make immediate preparation against the threatened visitation of cholera, as to check the progress of our own native epidemics, then and still so frightfully prevalent; diseases manifestly dependent on conditions within our control, and highly favourable to the spread of the pestilence then menacing, and now still more nearly menacing us. ”

“ But this beautiful world, into whose workings my eye now searched, presented itself to my view as a demonstration that the Creative Power is infinite in goodness, and seemed to afford, as if from the essential elements and profoundest depths of nature, a proof of His love. ”

“ We are told how, "in order to demonstrate what epidemic diseases really are, and what they are not, and to put an end to errors which have so long and so universally prevailed on this subject, errors which he believes to be the source of incalculable misery and of certain death to millions of the human race, Dr Maclean, with an energy scarcely to be paralleled, has devoted thirty years—a large portion of the active life of man. ”

“ Lord Shaftesbury speaks, in his diary of December 16, 1861, of that national loss, and then alludes to the death of my grandfather in these words:—
"I hear, too, that my valued friend and coadjutor in efforts for the sanitary improvement of England is gone—the learned, warm-hearted, highly-gifted Southwood Smith."
But the work he had set on foot and the principles he had established did not end with his life. They have gone on with an ever-increasing vitality to this day. ”

“ He called it, "Report on the Physical Causes of Sickness and Mortality to which the Poor are particularly exposed, and which are capable of prevention by Sanitary Measures." Its opening words are,—
"Some of the severest evils at present incident to the condition of poverty, which have a large share in inducing its high rate of sickness and mortality, are the consequences of improvidence. Such evils are capable of being remedied only by bringing the poor under the influence of the inducements to forethought and prudence. ”

“ Before these glorious gifts with which our common nature is endowed, with which all human beings without distinction are enriched, and which can be neither added to nor taken away, the little distinctions of man's creation sink into absolute insignificance. ”

“ The only modifications of the Act of 1833 which have been made since, have been mere extensions of its principles. The regulations, which at first applied to cotton, cloth, and silk mills only, have been extended by subsequent Acts to bleaching and dyeing works. Powers have also been given to compel the fencing of machinery, and to enforce other safeguards against injury to the workpeople.
Even after the Factory Commission had finished its work, and had ceased to exist, my grandfather continued to watch with interest the results of what had been done. ”