“The mortality has diminished in the Hôtel Dieu in remarkable proportions. Without saying anything of the enlargement of the windows, of the warm clothing, of a better system of heating the apartments, are we to count for nothing the destruction of all the high houses which surrounded the Hôtel Dieu on every side? In our opinion the pure and dry air which circulates now in every part, the sun which penetrates there, the stoves which have been erected, have as much contributed to its healthiness as the suppression of the amphitheatres of anatomy which were in its neighbourhood.”
The reports of other hospitals present similar and generally corroborative experience. In the space of four years, ending in 1784, in a badly-ventilated house, the Lying-in Hospital in Dublin, there died 2,944 children out of 7,650; but after freer ventilation, the deaths in the same period of time, and in a like number of children, amounted only to 279.
One effect of the attention given to the condition of the workers in the factories has been, that ventilation has been extensively introduced, and with marked effects, on the condition of the workpeople. When I was at Glasgow a striking instance was pointed out to me of the beneficial effects of ventilation when applied to the dwellings of the working classes connected with such establishments. I was informed there was in that city an assemblage of dwellings for their workpeople, called, from its mode of construction and the crowd collected in it, the Barracks. This building contained 500 persons; every room contained one family. The consequences of this crowding of the apartments, which were badly ventilated, and the filth were, that fever was scarcely ever absent from the building. There were sometimes as many as seven cases in one day, and in the last two months of 1831 there were 57 cases in the building. All attempts to induce the inmates to ventilate their rooms were ineffectual, and the proprietors of the work, on the recommendation of Mr. Fleming, a surgeon of the district, fixed a simple tin tube of two inches in diameter, into the ceiling of each room, and these tubes led into one general tube, the extremity of which was inserted into the chimney of the factory furnace. By the perpetual draught thus produced upon the atmosphere of each room the inmates were compelled, whether they would or not, to breathe pure air. The effect was that, during the ensuing eight years, fever was scarcely known in the place. The process was apparently defective only in not providing for the appropriate warmth of the air introduced. The cost of remedies previously applied in the public hospitals to the fever cases, continually produced as described in the barracks, were stated by Dr. Cowan to have afforded a striking contrast to the cost of the means of prevention.
Similar defective ventilation and overcrowding in rooms of work, with the addition of the deterioration of the air by the use of candles or gas-lamps at night-work, produce similar effects on the milliners and dressmakers employed at the larger workshops of the metropolis. In a return of the causes of death to the milliners and dressmakers who died during the year 1839, in the unions of the metropolis, in which we have no means of distinguishing those who worked separately or in small numbers, the results were as follows:—
| Tabular Statement of Deaths from Disease of Milliners and Dressmakers, in the Metropolitan Unions during the year 1839, as shown by the Mortuary Registers. | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Age. | Number of Deaths. | Average Age. | Number of Deaths from Consumption. | Average Age. | Number of Deaths from other Lung Diseases. | Average Age. |
| Under 20 | 6 | 17 | 4 | 18 | ||
| 20 Under 30 | 24 | 24 | 17 | 23 | 1 | 23 |
| 30 Under 40 | 11 | 34 | 6 | 34 | 1 | 33 |
| 40 Under 50 | 2 | 45 | 1 | 40 | ||
| 50 Under 60 | 4 | 54 | 1 | 58 | 2 | 55 |
| 60 Under 70 | 5 | 64 | ||||
| Total | 52 | 32 | 28 | 26 | 5 | 41 |
| Out of 52 deaths in the year, 41 of the deceased attained an age of 25. The average age of the 33 who died of lung diseases was 28. | ||||||
It is not doubted by medical witnesses that in this class of cases, as in the case of the tailors, one-third at least of the healthful duration of adult life will be found to have been destroyed by the ignorance of the want of ventilation.
Unhappily, this fatal ignorance as to the requisites of the places of work is as frequently manifested in the overcrowded places of repose. I take an illustration from the answers of Mr. Isaac Gilchrist, surgeon of Aberdeen, to the question as to the causes of fever:—
“In answering this query, the circumstance that calls for most remark in reference to this district is the overcrowded state of dwelling apartments. Six, eight, and even ten occupying one room is anything but uncommon; and these, too, it frequently happens, are lone women, all employed at the manufactories during the day and huddled together during the night. Fever finding its way into any of these apartments, seldom quits it until every member has been attacked. In some instances of families of eight or ten members, not one individual has escaped the disease. I believe also that deficient cleanliness (to a certain extent the result of poverty) and bad ventilation co-operate with the overcrowded state of the apartments in propagating fever.”
Similar information is frequent from the metropolis and other districts. It is understood, and it may confidently be expected, that the Commissioners and Assistant Commissioners appointed to investigate the employment of young persons employed in large numbers in other manufactures than those now included in the provisions of the Factory Act will investigate more closely than has hitherto been done the sanitary condition of the labourers employed in the mines as well as in other branches of industry. I take the following evidence respecting the condition of the lodging-shops, obtained by Dr. Mitchell, one of the Assistant Commissioners, in the course of his inquiries into the condition of the labouring population engaged in working the mines in Durham and Northumberland. He gives the following description of their sleeping places:—
“Many of the miners, including young persons and boys, will go three miles and upwards from their own homes in the morning to work in the mines, or to wash the ore, and return again after their work at night. Some miners, who are too far off to be able to go and come in this way, find lodgings for the four nights in the week, and the washers for five nights, at some houses not too far from the mines. The usual price is 6d. a-week each, for which sum there is a bed between two of them, leave to make their ‘crowdy’ on the fire in the morning, and they have their potatoes boiled for them in the evening. They bring their provisions in a wallet on the Monday mornings: the miners go back on the Friday, and the washers of ore on the Saturday. But there are many mines, and some of them very large, in remote situations in the Fells, far away from all dwelling-houses, where lodgings might be had, and the proprietors have erected for their miners and washers buildings called ‘lodging-shops,’ which I now am about to describe:—