“We know,” says an experienced and talented writer, “no country of Europe where there is so little disposition on the part of the people as in ours to give themselves even the exhilarating kind of ablution which is derived from bathing. Dirty faces, dirty clothes, dirty houses,—in fine, dirt all over,—are the characteristics of our people; and yet, bad as they are (from necessity generally), we know that there are worse effects underneath the surface, for where physical dirt is seen, there also presides moral degradation.”
It is true that within the last few years many praiseworthy exertions have been used for the purpose of establishing baths and wash-houses for the poor, which it is to be hoped will meet with further encouragement and extension; but as fashion rules a large portion of mankind, even in physic, we would suggest, that in order to secure a more complete and general use of personal ablution, our leaders of fashion and the upper classes who have so much to say on the subject of wash and bath-houses for the poor, should set the example by establishing baths, after the custom of the Orientals, in their own private residences; for, in spite of the increase of wealth and luxury, of the splendour and extent of the houses of recent erection in this country, baths are very far from being universal. Much may also be attained by patronising the few excellent but neglected public baths of this great metropolis; such measures would not only have the effect of increasing the number of those baths already established, but of inducing, from the increased facility, that personal purification, which ultimately would be found to be indispensable. “Usus est altera natura.”
In concluding these our remarks on the three grand essentials to life, we would observe that it is astonishing with what little amount of food a human being may live in health and strength, (we of course allude to those who eat to live,) when supplied in due proportion with the requisites for vitality,—namely, Light, Air, and Water. Further, we would ask, what can be more monstrous in this enlightened age, so outrageous of every principle of reason—so contrary to daily experience and common sense, as “the barring-out the free fresh air, and the meting-out to mortals of Heaven’s light,” by that blot on civilization, the window-tax,—a tax which originated in iniquity,[5] at a time, too, when so much is being agitated about sanitary measures?[6] We neglect the first principles of vitality, to go groping into sewers and cesspools, which we repeat are but secondary considerations, the ultimatum of which will prove to be but little better than the relief of the olfactories, to tickle the gustatory nerves by furnishing for our palates, in the shape of Thames water, the filthy abominations of an overgrown city.
While on the subject of Prophylaxis, we must not omit allusion to the barbarous and pestiferous custom of intramural burial, which cannot be too strongly deprecated, as being not only subversive of every Christian feeling—from the daily revolting spectacle of violated sanctuaries—but otherwise demoralizing in the extreme, and poisonous to the public. “Pessimum est tempore Pestis habitare in locis mortuorum monumentis propinquis.”
From the disgusting apathy evinced in this huge metropolis in the disposal of the dead, it would appear that nothing short of one of those terrible epidemic inflictions—inflictions with which in former days the Almighty was wont to visit the iniquities of his people, will bring those whose immediate province it is to a sense of the evils and perils of such abominations, which they, in spite of common sense, actuated by cupidity and fool-hardiness, still perpetuate.
“Ye who amid this feverish world would wear
A body free of pains, of cares the mind,
Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air;
Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke,
And volatile corruption from the dead,