“An important progress in the path we indicate was made in 1839, by the contrivance of M. Beslay, a mechanician, for steam-boilers—a contrivance which has been pointed out in several reports on this subject, and which proposes to prevent explosions and avoid smoke by means of a general use of coke. It is only to be regretted that it has not yet been able to be applied to all the purposes for which steam-boilers are employed.”
The improvements introduced by the council into the different branches of industry with which they have had to deal, and on which their reports enter into details at once useful and interesting, are numerous. Thus the refining of gold and silver, the factories for fulminating powder, for gilding, for chemical products, for bitumen, for melting tallow, and a mass of other trades, owe to them notable improvements, both in the methods of fabrication, and in the conditions for public health and safety under which they are to be carried on. The white-lead manufactories have excited their earnest solicitude. It is known that the workmen who labour in these places are subject to serious and frequent maladies. In consulting the earlier labours of the council, we see them unceasingly occupied with this question; but the frequency of the accidents, and their seriousness, have more particularly attracted their attention in these latter times, and have engaged them to compile a set of instructions which set forth the best rules of health to be observed in these manufactories. (The rules have already been quoted.)
Later, the council have anew examined deeply this branch of trade. They have visited the manufactories of white-lead existing in the department of the Seine; they have obtained the experience of other departments, and they have shown the necessity of commissioning one of their members to follow the results of the rules quoted above. They have required, moreover, that the administration should furnish some statistics on the state of workers in white-lead admitted into the hospital. The administration has hastened to defer to this wish, and there is no doubt that there will result a sensible improvement in the health of the workmen.
(After giving several other minor instances of the labours of the Conseil, the report thus concludes:—)
And now that we have detailed the principal labours of the council, it would be a necessary supplement to this article to show the results that have followed from them,—the reforms they have introduced into the public service. But here we are no more dealing with the labours of the council, but with the labours of the administration. Thus independently of the decisions on classed establishments, and which amount to about 300 a-year, it would be necessary to describe the measures for the public health executed by the administration. But to confine ourselves only to acts which interest the generality of the citizens, we may cite the ordinances of police which relate to coloured sugar-plums; to horses attacked with the glanders, or contagious maladies; to vessels and utensils of copper; to the adulteration of salt; to the aid to be given to the drowned and asphyxied; to the depôts for refuse in the rural communes; to the dissection, modelling, and embalming of corpses; to the cleaning of wells and waste-water wells; to the adulteration and sale of fulminating powder; to the classification of new trades, the amphitheatres of anatomy, the establishments of pork-butchers, &c. &c.
Certainly there are few institutions that can show such results; there are few that receive an impulse so enlightened and constant. Bound in an intimate manner with the administration of which they form part, the “Conseil de Salubrité” has at all times, found in it a just appreciator of their labours. They know the credit accorded to their reports, and the duties imposed on them by a confidence so honourable for the administration that gives it, and so justly merited by the body that receives it.
16.—Qualifications of Officers of Public Health: Statement by M. Duchâtelet.
It is generally thought in the world that the medical knowledge acquired in the schools is all that is necessary to become a useful member of the council. The greater part of medical men themselves share this opinion; and on the strength of some precepts which they have collected from books on health and professions, they think themselves sufficiently instructed to decide on the instant the gravest questions, which can only be resolved by special studies.
A man may have exhausted medical literature; he may be an excellent practician at the sick-bed, a learned physician, a clever and eloquent professor; but all these acquirements, taken in themselves, are nearly useless in a Conseil de Salubrité like that of Paris; and if an occasion presents itself to make use of them, a very small number of persons suffice to apply them. To be really useful in the council, it is necessary to have an extended knowledge of natural philosophy, of the constitution of the soil on which Paris stands, and of the geology of neighbouring countries; it is necessary, above all, to know with exactness the action which trades may have on the health of those who exercise them, and the much more important action of manufactories of every species on plants, on men congregated in towns, and on animals. This knowledge, so important, of the action of manufactories and trades, is not to be acquired by ordinary study, or in the silence of the cabinet. It is not to be obtained without positive notions on the arts, and on the greater part of the processes peculiar to each trade. It requires habit and the frequenting of the places of work. In this particular, more even than with medicine, books are not a substitute for practice; and if there exist works on the subject, they are more likely to mislead than enlighten.
From what has been said, the necessity will be evident to introduce into the council those physicians who have made health, and particularly the public health, a special study; and to join with them chemists, and, above all, manufacturing chemists, because what would many of those persons, whose life has been passed in hospitals and the exclusive study of medicine, be before a steam engine? It is clear that they would often be deceived by those adroit and skilful manufacturers who would have an interest in concealing the truth.