Hygeia, a City of Health

by Benjamin Ward Richardson

All animals used for food,—cattle, fowls, swine, rabbits,—are subjected to examination in the slaughter-house, or in the market, if they be brought into the city from other depôts. The slaughter-houses are so constructed that the animals killed are relieved from the pain of death. They pass through a narcotic chamber, and are brought to the slaughterer oblivious of their fate. The slaughter-houses drain into the sewers of the city, and their complete purification daily, from all offal and refuse, is rigidly enforced.

The buildings, sheds, and styes for domestic food-producing animals are removed a short distance from the city, and are also under the supervision of the sanitary officer; the food and water supplied for these animals comes equally, with human food, under proper inspection.

One other subject only remains to be noticed in connection with the arrangements of our model city, and that is the mode of the disposal of the dead. The question of cremation and of burial in the earth has been considered, and there are some who advocate cremation. For various reasons the process of burial is still retained. Firstly, because the cremation process is open to serious medico-legal objections; secondly, because, by the complete resolution of the body into its elementary and inodorous gases in the cremation furnace, that intervening chemical link between the organic and inorganic worlds, the ammonia, is destroyed, and the economy of nature is thereby dangerously disturbed; thirdly, because the natural tendencies of the people lead them still to the earth, as the most fitting resting-place into which, when lifeless, they should be drawn.

Thus the cemetery holds its place in our city, but in a form much modified from the ordinary cemetery. The burial ground is artificially made of a fine carboniferous earth. Vegetation of rapid growth is cultivated over it. The dead are placed in the earth from the bier, either in basket work or simply in the shroud; and the monumental slab, instead of being set over or at the head or foot of a raised grave, is placed in a spacious covered hall or temple, and records simply the fact that the person commemorated was recommitted to earth in those grounds. In a few months, indeed, no monument would indicate the remains of any dead. In that rapidly-resolving soil the transformation of dust into dust is too perfect to leave a trace of residuum. The natural circle of transmutation is harmlessly completed, and the economy of nature conserved.

RESULTS.

Omitting, necessarily, many minor but yet important details, I close the description of the imaginary health city. I have yet to indicate what are the results that might be fairly predicted in respect to the disease and mortality presented under the conditions specified.

Two kinds of observation guide me in this essay: one derived from statistical and sanitary work; the other from experience, extended now over thirty years, of disease, its phenomena, its origins, its causes, its terminations.

I infer, then, that in our model city certain forms of disease would find no possible home, or, at the worst, a home so transient as not to affect the mortality in any serious degree. The infantile diseases, infantile and remittent fevers, convulsions, diarrhoea, croup, marasmus, dysentery, would, I calculate, be almost unknown. Typhus and typhoid fevers and cholera could not, I believe, exist in the city except temporarily, and by pure accident; small-pox would be kept under entire control; puerperal fever and hospital fever would, probably, cease altogether; rheumatic fever, induced by residence in damp houses, and the heart disease subsequent upon it, would be removed. Death from privation and from purpura and scurvy would certainly cease. Delirium tremens, liver disease, alcoholic phthisis, alcoholic degeneration of kidney and all the varied forms of paralysis, insanity, and other affections due to alcohol, would be completely effaced. The parasitic diseases arising from the introduction into the body, through food, of the larvae of the entozoa, would cease. That large class of deaths from pulmonary consumption, induced in less favoured cities by exposure to impure air and badly ventilated rooms, would, I believe, be reduced so as to bring down the mortality of this signally fatal malady one third at least.

Some diseases, pre-eminently those which arise from uncontrollable causes, from sudden fluctuations of temperature, electrical storms, and similar great variations of nature, would remain as active as ever; and pneumonia, bronchitis, congestion of the lungs, and summer cholera, would still hold their sway. Cancer, also, and allied constitutional diseases of strong hereditary character, would yet, as far as I can see, prevail. I fear, moreover, it must be admitted that two or three of the epidemic diseases, notably scarlet fever, measles, and whooping cough, would assert themselves, and, though limited in their diffusion by the sanitary provisions for arresting their progress, would claim a considerable number of victims.

With these last facts clearly in view, I must be careful not to claim for my model city more than it deserves; but calculating the mortality which would be saved, and comparing the result with the mortality which now prevails in the most favoured of our large English towns, I conclude that an average mortality of eight per thousand would be the maximum in the first generation living under this salutary régime. That in a succeeding generation Mr. Chadwick's estimate of a possible mortality of five per thousand would be realised, I have no reasonable doubt, since the almost unrecognised, though potent, influence of heredity in disease would immediately lessen in intensity, and the healthier parents would bring forth the healthier offspring.