Page:The present and general condition of sanitary science.djvu/10

6 to prevent them spreading, entrust the removal of the patient to the Sanitary Inspector, who would be ordered to see to the fitness of the habitation for recovery or else to provide a proper place. It is a mark of our progress that such official sanitary qualifications as now abound, which qualifications it is economical to pay for, did not then exist, or were to be obtained in a few instances only, such as that of Dr. Neil Arnott, at such salaries as we could induce a Chancellor of the Exchequer to pay for them.

The greatest and the grandest advance in the power of sanitation made in my time is, it appears to me, that for the extinction of the chief children's diseases, measles, scarlatina, typhus, and diptheria [sic]—an advance carefully and efficiently tested and ascertained in the chief district half-time schools, where the death-rate, amongst the children who come into those institutions with no developed disease upon them, is reduced to less than three in a thousand, or less than one-third of the death-rate prevalent amongst the general population. Such reduction is coincident with the reduction of the death-rates in the prisons, the former seats of epidemics, where amongst the persons who enter without developed disease upon them, the epidemics are entirely expelled, and the death-rates reduced below three in a thousand, or to less than a third of the death-rates prevalent amongst the unprotected population outside.

Physicians are beginning to declare that a large amount of the crime for which punishment is inflicted is due to insanity, and that insanity is due to low physical conditions which sanitation by early physical training would remove. There are experiences to show that this is the fact. Dr. Ashe and others conversant with the lunatic asylum declare that, as a class, lunatics are of low physical condition, and that that low condition is reducible by sanitation and early physical training; an important matter, for 80,000 lunatics are now burthening the rates. Of 30,000 blind persons, the late Dr. Rolph declared that two-thirds might have been saved by early sanitation. There are experiences, too long to particularise on this occasion, which sustain these several conclusions.

These experiences are also of vital importance in their application to prison life. But there is another part of our national life and strength which yields the same results. I