24.—Extract from Dr. Ferriar’s Advice to the Labouring Classes in Manchester; given in 1800.
Avoid living in damp cellars; they destroy your constitutions and shorten your lives. No temptation of low rents can counterbalance their ill effects. You are apt to crowd into the cellars of new buildings, supposing them to be clean; this is a fatal mistake; a new house is always damp for two years, and the cellars which you inhabit under them are generally as moist as the bottom of a well. In such places you are liable to bad fevers, which often throw the patient into a decline, and you are apt to get rheumatic complaints, that continue for a long time and disable you from working.
If you cannot help taking a cellar, be attentive to have all the windows put in good repair before you venture into it, and, if possible, get it whitewashed. If you attempt to live in a cellar with broken windows, colds and fevers will be the certain consequences.
In many parts of the town you sleep in back rooms, behind the front cellar, which are dark and have no proper circulation of air. It would be much more healthy to sleep to the front; at least when you have large families, which is often the case, you ought to divide them, and not to crowd the whole together in the back cellar.
Keep your persons and houses as clean as your employments will permit, and do not regret the loss of an hour’s wages when your time is occupied in attending to cleanliness. It is better to give up a little time occasionally to keep your houses neat, than to see your whole family lying sick in consequence of working constantly without cleaning. It would be of great service if you could contrive to air your bed and bed-clothes out of doors once or twice a-week.
Always wash your children from head to foot with cold water before you send them to work in the morning. Take care to keep them dry in their feet, and never allow them to go to work without giving them their breakfast, though you should have nothing to offer them but a crust of bread and a little water. Children who get wet feet, when they go out early fasting, seldom escape fever or severe colds.
Your health will always be materially injured by the following circumstances:—living in small back buildings, adjoining to the open vaults of privies; living in cellars where the streets are not properly soughed or drained; living in narrow bye-streets where sheep are slaughtered, and where the blood and garbage are allowed to stagnate and corrupt, and perhaps more than all, by living crowded together in dirty lodging-houses, where you cannot have the common comforts of light and air.
It should be unnecessary to remind you that much sickness is occasioned among you by passing your evenings at ale-houses, or in strolling about the streets or in the fields adjoining to the town. Perhaps those who are most apt to expose themselves in this manner would pay little attention to dissuasive arguments of any kind; however, those who feel an interest in your welfare cannot omit making the remark.