Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 682 / January 20, 1877.

A remarkable attempt has been made to bring into one focus numerous suggestions put forth, within the last few years by social improvers and sanitary reformers. These suggestions, as our readers are aware, take a very wide range. Matters relating to water-supply, drainage, disposal of refuse, lighting, ventilation, dry foundations and dry walls to houses, stoves and fireplaces, cookery and kitchen arrangements, washing and drying appliances, cleanliness of person and of garments, cleanliness of rooms and of bedding, special arrangements for unwholesome but necessary trades and employments, provision for the sick that may not be perilous to other persons, moderation in diet and regimen, avoidance of vicious indulgences—all these and many other subjects have engaged the attention of thoughtful persons in a marked degree; and it can be indisputably shewn that the annual death-rate is lowered in districts where improvements in such matters have been extensively adopted. Mr Edwin Chadwick, perhaps the chief worker in this laudable direction, is so confident in the eventual success of such endeavours, that he announces the possibility of building a city that shall have any assignable death-rate or annual mortality, from a maximum of fifty or more in a thousand to a minimum of five or less in a thousand. Dr B. W. Richardson, a physician and physiologist of eminence, has taken hold of Mr Chadwick's idea, and sketched the plan of a city that shall shew the lowest rate of mortality. No such city—we need hardly say—exists, and he has neither the time nor the means to build one; but his purpose is to shew that it can be done, whenever public opinion is ripe for it.
Dr Richardson, in an Address to the Social Science Association, afterwards published in a separate form, speaks of his Hygeia or City of Health in the present tense, as if it already existed. This is done for vividness of description and brevity of language, and will be understood by the reader in the proper sense.