Hygeia, a City of Health

by Benjamin Ward Richardson

The water-closets in the houses are situated on the middle and basement floors. The continuous water-supply flushes them without danger of charging the drinking water with gases emanating from the closet; a danger so imminent in the present method of cisterns, which supply drinking as well as flushing water.

As we walk the streets of our model city, we notice an absence of places for the public sale of spirituous liquors. Whether this be a voluntary purgation in goodly imitation of the National Temperance League, the effect of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's Permissive Bill and most permissive wit and wisdom, or the work of the Good Templars, we need not stay to inquire. We look at the fact only. To this city, as to the town of St. Johnsbury, in Vermont, which Mr. Hepworth Dixon has so graphically described, we may apply the description Mr. Dixon has written: 'No bar, no dram shop, no saloon defiles the place. Nor is there a single gaming hell or house of ill-repute.' Through all the workshops into which we pass, in whatever labour the men or women may be occupied,—and the place is noted for its manufacturing industry,—at whatever degree of heat or cold, strong drink is unknown. Practically, we are in a total abstainers' town, and a man seen intoxicated would be so avoided by the whole community, he would have no peace to remain.

And, as smoking and drinking go largely together, as the two practices were, indeed, original exchanges of social degradations between the civilised man and the savage, the savage getting very much the worst of the bargain, so the practices largely disappear together. Pipe and glass, cigar and sherry-cobbler, like the Siamese twins, who could only live connected, have both died out in our model city. Tobacco, by far the most innocent partner of the firm, lived, as it perhaps deserved to do, a little the longest; but it passed away, and the tobacconist's counter, like the dram counter, has disappeared.

The streets of our city, though sufficiently filled with busy people, are comparatively silent. The subways relieve the heavy traffic, and the factories are all at short distances from the town, except those in which the work that is carried on is silent and free from nuisance. This brings me to speak of some of the public buildings which have relation to our present studies.

It has been found in our towns, generally, that men and women who are engaged in industrial callings, such as tailoring, shoe-making, dressmaking, lace-work and the like, work at their own homes amongst their children. That this is a common cause of disease is well understood. I have myself seen the half-made riding-habit that was ultimately to clothe some wealthy damsel rejoicing in her morning ride act as the coverlet of a poor tailor's child stricken with malignant scarlet fever. These things must be, in the ordinary course of events under our present bad sanitary system. In the model city we have in our mind's eye, these dangers are met by the simple provision of workmen's offices or workrooms. In convenient parts of the town there are blocks of buildings, designed mainly after the manner of the houses, in which each workman can have a work-room on payment of a moderate sum per week. Here he may work as many hours as he pleases, but he may not transform the room into a home. Each block is under the charge of a superintendent, and also under the observation of the sanitary authorities. The family is thus separated from the work, and the working man is secured the same advantages as the lawyer, the merchant, the banker now possesses: or to make the parallel more correct, he has the same advantage as the man or woman who works in a factory, and goes home to eat and to sleep.

In most towns throughout the kingdom the laundry system is dangerous in the extreme. For anything the healthy householder knows, the clothes he and his children wear have been mixed before, during, and after the process of washing, with the clothes that have come from the bed or the body of some sufferer from a contagious malady. Some of the most fatal outbreaks of disease I have met with have been communicated in this manner. In our model community this danger is entirely avoided by the establishment of public laundries, under municipal direction. No person is obliged to send any article of clothing to be washed at the public laundry; but if he does not send there he must have the washing done at home. Private laundries that do not come under the inspection of the sanitary officer are absolutely forbidden. It is incumbent on all who send clothes to the public laundry from an infected house to state the fact. The clothes thus received are passed for special cleansing into the disinfecting rooms. They are specially washed, dried and prepared for future wear. The laundries are placed in convenient positions, a little outside the town; they have extensive drying grounds, and, practically, they are worked so economically, that homewashing days, those invaders of domestic comfort and health, are abolished.

Passing along the main streets of the city we see in twenty places, equally distant, a separate building surrounded by its own grounds,—a model hospital for the sick. To make these institutions the best of their kind, no expense is spared. Several elements contribute to their success. They are small, and are readily removable. The old idea of warehousing diseases on the largest possible scale, and of making it the boast of an institution that it contains so many hundred beds, is abandoned here. The old idea of building an institution so that it shall stand for centuries, like a Norman castle, but, unlike the castle, still retain its original character as a shelter for the afflicted, is abandoned here. The still more absurd idea of building hospitals for the treatment of special organs of the body, as if the different organs could walk out of the body and present themselves for treatment, is also abandoned.

It will repay us a minute of time to look at one of these model hospitals. One is the fac simile of the other, and is devoted to the service of every five thousand of the population. Like every building in the place, it is erected on a subway. There is a wide central entrance, to which there is no ascent, and into which a carriage, cab, or ambulance can drive direct. On each side the gateway are the houses of the resident medical officer and of the matron. Passing down the centre, which is lofty and covered in with glass, we arrive at two sidewings running right and left from the centre, and forming cross-corridors. These are the wards: twelve on one hand for male, twelve on the other for female patients. The cross-corridors are twelve feet wide and twenty feet high, and are roofed with glass; The corridor on each side is a framework of walls of glazed brick, arched over head, and divided into six segments. In each segment is a separate, light, elegant removable ward, constructed of glass and iron, twelve feet high, fourteen feet long, and ten feet wide. The cubic capacity of each ward is 1,680 feet. Every patient who is ill enough to require constant attendance has one of these wards entirely to himself, so that the injurious influences on the sick, which are created by mixing up, in one large room, the living and the dying; those who could sleep, were they at rest, with those who cannot sleep, because they are racked with pain; those who are too nervous or sensitive to move, or cough, or speak, lest they should disturb others; and those who do whatever pleases them:—these bad influences are absent.

The wards are fitted up neatly and elegantly. At one end they open into the corridor, at the other towards a verandah which leads to a garden. In bright weather those sick persons, who are even confined to bed, can, under the direction of the doctor, be wheeled in their beds out into the gardens without leaving the level floor. The wards are warmed by a current of air made to circulate through them by the action of a steam-engine, with which every hospital is supplied, and which performs such a number of useful purposes, that the wonder is, how hospital management could go on without the engine.

If at any time a ward becomes infectious, it is removed from its position and is replaced by a new ward. It is then taken to pieces, disinfected, and laid by ready to replace another that may require temporary ejection.