About the middle of April inst., a poor chimney-sweeper came up twelve miles from town to the Middlesex Hospital. He had suffered great pain for two years, and it was feared that the disorder had too deep a hold upon him to be ever removed, even if he had submitted to the awful operation. The matter was fully explained to him. He was told that he might remain as long as he pleased in the house; that the operation would not be performed without his full consent; but the dread of what he thought might possibly be done, induced him to leave all the comforts by which he was surrounded, to die in all the wretchedness of abject poverty. Making ten instances of this frightful disease that have come to the knowledge of one member of your Committee in the year ending with the 30th April, notwithstanding the incessant efforts of the trade to conceal them.
Sir Astley Cooper, in his evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords, in 1834, declares—“I believe the disease is entirely the result of the specific irritation of the soot;” and again, “I must have seen, I think, more than 100 cases of it in my experience. I have seen three or four cases in a year, and having been thirty-four years surgeon to one of the hospitals, the calculation is easy, and I think I am not exceeding the truth, in saying, a hundred examples of it.” A very large proportion of the comparatively few persons engaged in this wretched trade.
Would that those who are so much amused with the Society’s efforts, and who smile with so much self-satisfaction at the Society’s “busy trifling,” could have gone the round of the cases above selected.
It was, no doubt, highly amusing to see the poor creatures lying on the bed of languishing.
One was a young man of weak intellects, who had probably been an easy prey to the vain promises held out to him in childhood, if he would be a chimney-sweeper. It was an awful spectacle to see them motionless in their beds, as the frightful disease was eating away their flesh, because a British public cannot be induced to disturb themselves in a matter “of such trifling importance.”
Men say, “Am I to be vexed and harassed, as though the guilt of upholding the old system rested wholly upon me, because I, individually, refuse to be a convert?” How are the following words to be understood?—“If any man see his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”
This sketch of the unavoidable misery connected with the trade is calculated to awaken the attention of the public, and it is hoped that it may call forth such contributions as are required to do away the evil. If one surgeon, in one district, has had 100 of the cases under his care, what would the experience of this city alone amount to?
In asking for pecuniary aid, your Committee would be far from pressing the subject upon those whose means are small; from such they only ask, that the Society’s Agents may be employed exclusively in their houses, for by this the cause of humanity will be materially served, without any additional cost to themselves; and they are earnestly entreated to recommend the same course to their friends.
But an appeal of a very different kind is made to those who have ample funds at their disposal, who are known to put aside large sums every year for the purposes of Christian charity, but who have never made this Society glad by their benevolence. There is no eclat connected with this subject—but it is the ministering to the very humblest class, who are visited in their filthy wretchedness and obscurity, with a desire to free them from sorrows which are unknown to any other class of the community.
Too much cannot be said of the liberality of this country, and yet no effort is made to support an Association which labours to free helpless infancy from broken-hearted sorrow, and to protect mature age from a disease generally fatal.