In 1838 Dr. Guy became Professor of Forensic Medicine in King’s College, London, and later Assistant-Physician to King’s College Hospital. He early directed his attention to statistics, and joined the Statistical Society in 1839, and became one of its honorary secretaries in 1843. 1844 he contributed important evidence before the Health of Towns Commission, on the state of the London printing-offices, and the consequent development of pulmonary consumption among printers. He co-operated in founding the Health of Towns Association, and has been incessantly occupied in public lectures, investigations, and writings, in calling attention to questions of sanitary reform. He has been notably concerned in the improvement of ventilation, the utilisation of sewage, the health of bakers and soldiers, hospital mortality, and many other like subjects. In 1873 he was President of the Statistical Society, and he has successively been Croonian, Lumleian, and Harveian Lecturer at the College of Physicians. His various publications and papers are too numerous to recount. We may, however, mention the “Principles of Forensic Medicine,” and successive editions of Hooper’s “Physicians’ Vade Mecum.”
Mr. John Simon, C.B., F.R.S., is one of the veterans of the present day in matters of public health, besides having the highest reputation as a surgeon and pathologist. Born in 1816, Mr. Simon was a student of King’s College, London, and was elected a fellow of the College of Surgeons in 1844. He was appointed in 1847 lecturer on Pathology at St. Thomas’s Hospital. His subsequent researches and writings, especially those on Inflammation, have proved his great fitness for the post. In 1850 he published a very original course of lectures on General Pathology, as conducive to the establishment of Rational Principles for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease.
Mr. Simon’s career in connection with public health began with his being appointed the first Medical Officer of Health to the City of London. He was before long selected as medical adviser to the General Board of Health, and was thence transferred to the important post of medical officer to the Privy Council. In this capacity his labours, ably seconded by a crowd of zealous workers, have been of priceless value to the nation at large. The successive annual reports published by the Privy Council sufficiently attest this.
In his first report to the Privy Council, Mr. Simon stated “that more than half of our annual mortality results from diseases which prevail with a very great range of difference in proportion as sanitary circumstances are bad or good; that, according to the latest available evidence, some of these diseases prevail twice or thrice, some of them ten or twenty times, some of them even forty or fifty times, as fatally in some districts as in other districts of England; that the result of their excessive partial development is to render the mortality of certain districts from 50 to 100 per cent. higher than the mortality of other districts, and to raise the death-rate of the whole country 33 per cent. above the death-rate of its healthiest parts.”
In his eleventh report Mr. Simon was able to write as follows: “It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate, in one most important point of view, the progress which, during the last few years, has been made in sanitary legislation. The principles now affirmed in our statute-book are such as, if carried into full effect, would soon reduce to quite an insignificant amount our present very large proportions of preventable disease.... Large powers have been given to local authorities, and obligation expressly imposed on them, as regards their respective districts, to suppress all kinds of nuisance, and to provide all such works and establishments as the public health primarily requires; while auxiliary powers have been given for more or less optional exercise in matters deemed of less than primary importance to health.... The State ... has interfered between parent and child ... between employer and employed ... between vendor and purchaser; has put restrictions on the sale and purchase of poisons; has prohibited in certain cases certain commercial supplies of water; and has made it a public offence to sell adulterated food, or drink, or medicine, or to offer for sale any meat unfit for human food.... Its care for the treatment of disease has not been unconditionally limited to treating at the public expense such sickness as may accompany destitution; it has provided that in any sort of epidemic emergency, organised medical assistance, not peculiarly for paupers, may be required of local authorities; and in the same spirit requires that vaccination at the public cost shall be given gratuitously to every claimant.”
Mr. Simon has been a distinguished surgeon to St. Thomas’s Hospital, and attained some years ago the Presidency of the College of Surgeons. He is also a member of the General Medical Council. In 1878 his bust in marble was presented to the College of Surgeons by public subscription, in recognition of his eminent services in sanitary science.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] See the Lancet, March 25, 1876, p. 481.
[25] Medical Times and Gazette, March 25, 1876, p. 348.