London (Ancient and Modern) from the Sanitary and Medical Point of View

THE CENTRE OF LONDON IN 1658, REPRODUCED FROM NEWCOURT’S MAP.
(A larger version of this map is available at Project Gutenberg)
BY G. V. POORE, M.D., F.R.C.P.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: London, Paris, New York & Melbourne . 1889.

This little book is an expansion of two addresses delivered in January, 1889.
One of these addresses, which deals with the Sanitary Aspects of Ancient and Modern London, was given in the Parkes Museum of the Sanitary Institute, and was written for a mixed audience. The other formed the subject of the annual address to the Students’ Medical Society at University College, London, and was written for an audience which might be expected to have a special interest in the History of Medicine in London.
Both have already appeared in print; the first in Public Health , the journal of the Society of Medical Officers of Health; and the second in the Lancet . For the loan of most of the woodcuts the author is indebted to the Publishers of the Lancet , who kindly undertook, when the lecture was appearing in their columns, to illustrate it with five illustrations, which were made especially for the purpose. One illustration has been supplied by the proprietors of Public Health , and four have been borrowed from “Cassell’s Old and New London.”


In considering the sanitary conditions of a great city like London, it behoves us to remember that it has been a place of importance since the days of the Roman occupation of this country—that is, for some 1,500 years.
A place that has been peopled for centuries is very apt, in the absence of special precautions, to become unwholesome by reason of the vast accumulation of refuse. Roman London is many yards beneath the surface of the present City. It has been deeply buried, and by what? By refuse and debris from every source; and this in itself is necessarily a danger to health, and doubtless has in times past greatly tended to produce many of those diseases for which mediæval (and even modern) London was noted.