He mentions that it has happened to him, in his visits to the poor, as Physician to the Eastern Dispensary, to be unable to stay in the room, even to write the prescription.
“What must it be,” he adds, “to live in such an atmosphere, and to go through the process of disease in it?”
In another place he says,
“You cannot in fact cure. As long as the poor remain in the situations which produce their disease, the proper remedies for such disease cannot be applied to them.”
This state of things, too, according to the same authority, is advancing on us:
“Whatever may be the cause, the fact is certain, that at the present time an epidemic is prevailing, which lays prostrate the powers of life more rapidly and completely than any other epidemic that has appeared for a long series of years.”
The experienced student of history, reading of long wars, looks for their consummation in the coming pestilence. Gathering itself up, now from the ravaged territory, now from the beleaguered town, now from the carnage of the battle field, this awful form arises at last in its full strength, and rushing over the world, leaves far behind man’s puny efforts at extermination. We have a domestic pestilence, it seems, dwelling with us; and if we look into the causes of that, shall we find less to blame, or less to mourn over, than in the insane wars which are the more acknowledged heralds of this swift destruction? But, to return to detail. Mr. Toynbee, one of the surgeons of the St. George’s and the St. James’s Dispensary, tells us:
“In the class of patients to our dispensary, nearly all the families have but a single room each, and a very great number have only one bed to each family. The state of things in respect to morals, as well as health, I sometimes find to be terrible. I am now attending one family, where the father, about 50, the mother about the same age, a grown up son about 20, in a consumption, and a daughter about 17, who has scrofulous affection of the jaw and throat, for which I am attending her, and a child, all sleep in the same bed in a room where the father and three or four other men work during the day as tailors, and they frequently work there late at night with candles. I am also treating, at this present time, a woman with paralysis of the lower extremities, the wife of the assistant to a stable-keeper, whose eldest son, the son by a former wife, and a girl of 11 or 12 years of age, all sleep in the same bed! In another case which I am attending in one room, there are a man and his wife, a grown up daughter, a boy of 16, and a girl of 13; the boy has scrofulous ulcers in the neck; the father, though only of the age of 49, suffers from extreme debility and a broken constitution.”
The medical officer of the Whitechapel Union says,
“I know of few instances where there is more than one room to a family.”