One of the most important events of our time was the establishment of the Registrar-General’s office in 1838. To Dr. William Farr we owe a nation’s gratitude for the admirable manner in which he performed the duties of his office. The Government Inquiry into the Health of Towns and of the Country generally, undertaken by Edwin Chadwick, Southwood Smith, Neil Arnott, Sutherland, Guy, Toynbee, and others, was of immense importance to the national health. The medical officer to the Privy Council, Simon, carried on the work thus ably commenced with the greatest vigour; and the consequence of the important departure was that medical officers of health were appointed to the different towns and parishes.
Various public health acts have followed from time to time, and it has been found, in the words of Mr. Parkes, that “nothing is so costly in all ways as disease, and that nothing is so remunerative as the outlay which augments health, and in doing so, augments the amount and value of the work done.”
It is a reproach frequently brought against medicine that it makes little advance. Some have even said that in some respects we are no better off than if we lived in the days of Hippocrates. However this may be, we may be justly proud of the splendid work which hygienic medicine has performed, and we have every reason to look hopefully forward to the benefits this branch of medical science will confer upon us in the near future. Hygiene is the outcome of physiology. Until we knew the laws of life, it was impossible that hygiene should have a scientific basis; and henceforth physiology and hygiene will go hand in hand.[1054]
John Simon, C.B., F.R.S. (born 1816), the eminent physiologist, pathologist, and surgeon, became the first appointed officer of health to the City of London. He was for some time medical adviser to the Privy Council. He rendered the greatest services to the health of the nation by his reports and official papers on sanitary matters.
Edmund A. Parkes (1819-1876) was the great sanitary reformer whose name is gratefully enshrined in the “Parkes Museum of Hygiene,” instituted in 1876, of University College, London.
Ludwig J. P. Semmelweis (1818-1865), “the Father of Antiseptic Midwifery,” was professor in Pesth, and has earned the gratitude of his profession and of the whole world by demonstrating that puerperal fever was due to inoculation, that the poison which caused it was introduced by organic matter below the nails and epidermis of the students and doctors who had been engaged in anatomical or pathological work and had not taken sufficient pains to disinfect and purify their hands. He recommended careful washing with chlorine water before each examination; the consequence of which was, that the mortality among lying-in women fell in two months from twelve to three per cent. He anticipated the methods of Lister, and died in a lunatic asylum, galled by the attacks which his doctrines experienced.[1055] Sir Andrew Clark said:[1056] “There are few such parallels in the history of science, in regard to his tremendous moral heroism; in spite of every conceivable difficulty, in positions of misrepresentation, in spite of persecution, he continued his labours, until crowned with a full clearing up of the difficulties. As to his martyrdom, there is not such a history. The persecution to which he was exposed in the later years of his stay in Vienna, his being hounded out of Vienna and settling in Budapest, and his premature end in loss of reason, form indeed a sad story, and one of the highest examples that can be presented.”
Bacteriologists and other Scientists.
Benjamin W. Richardson, M.D., F.R.S., etc. (born 1828). In 1865 he made important researches on the nature of the poisons of contagious diseases and discovered septine. In 1866 he discovered the use of the ether spray for locally abolishing pain in surgical operations. He introduced bichloride of methylene as an anæsthetic, and discovered the influence of nitrite of amyl over tetanus, angina pectoris, etc. He invented the lethal chamber for killing animals without pain, and has made many most important researches on the action of alcohol on man. In 1875 he gave a sketch of a “Model City of Health,” to be called Hygeia, which awakened much interest and discussion.
John Burdon Sanderson, M.D. (born 1828), Professor of Physiology at Oxford, made investigations respecting the cattle plague, 1865-66. In 1883 he sat on the Royal Commission on Hospitals for infectious diseases, and has made elaborate researches on animal and plant electricity, and on the nature of contagion.
Robert Koch (born 1843), the eminent bacteriologist, the discoverer of the “comma” bacillus, and the tubercle bacillus, is Professor of the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin.