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years practically disposed of these difficulties, so far as the London common lodging
houses and Salvation Army shelters were concerned. The problem of bugs, in the
poorest tenement houses and cottages, still remains finally to be disposed of, by
steady use by Borough Councils of the powers conferred by the County Council's
new code of bye-laws. In the early days the lodgers in the shelters were accommodated
in bunks, either laid on the floor or arranged in tiers known as "double
deckers." Some contained as many as six beds and were three stories high, the
top beds being reached by a ladder. They were supplied with American cloth
mattresses and coverings but not with sheets, and lodgers often slept in their clothes,
or if they undressed wrapped themselves in newspapers for warmth.
Many special provisions relating to food supplies (ice-cream, fried-fish shops,
places where food is stored, etc.), to water supplies on upper floors of tenement
houses, and to vermin, were obtained by the Council in its successive General Powers
Acts; and numbers of reports by the Medical Officer and his assistants on dust
destructors, cemeteries, houses let in lodgings, anthrax, disinfection, mortuaries,
mineral waters, watercress beds, milk outbreaks and milk examination, and on
cholera, plague, smallpox, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, influenza, cerebrospinal
fever, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, etc., etc., were issued by the Council.
The house-fly problem was studied and solved, not by fly-papers, but by removal
of the breeding grounds of the fly. An American hygienist visiting London some
15 years ago observed that he had seen most of the cities in the States and in Europe
but knew none so free from the house-fly nuisance as London. Fleas and lice have
given ground more slowly, but are steadily being put to rojit. The extensive use
made by Borough Councils of their powers of disinfecting premises, clothing and
bedding, and the greatly increased facilities for hospital treatment of infectious
disease (with consequential cleansing and disinfestation of the patients) afforded
by the Metropolitan Asylums Board, have no doubt contributed materially to
reduction of prevalence of body vermin. Already, in 1901, the Council, in view of
possible introduction of disease from abroad by seamen, had, using the powers
conferred by Section 214 of the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, made bye-laws regulating
Seamen's Lodging Houses, and these were approved by the Board of Trade.
In 1909 powers of licensing the houses annually were also obtained, and under
these powers not only was London safeguarded against exotic diseases, such as
plague and cholera, but the seamen were protected by the steps taken to prevent
verminous conditions, gambling, opium smoking and immorality.
Of late years strenuous efforts have been made by the Council, as Education
Authority, to push the fight against verminous conditions to a finish, by securing
complete cleanliness of the rising generation; to this end much more extended use
of the Public Baths of London by school children has been encouraged as an educational
measure ; this campaign has been greatly helped by school teachers, and has
been much appreciated by the children and their parents ; it has moreover, led to
largely increased voluntary use of these baths. Provision has, further, been made
by the Council for coping with the slighter cases of infestation of children's heads,
at special cleansing stations. It is, perhaps, in connection with personal hygiene,
now generally recognised as forming such an important part of preventive medicine,
that the influence of education upon health has been most conspicuously apparent.
Reference was made in these annual reports shortly before the war to an enquiry
instituted by Sir Robert Blair, with the help of a number of head teachers, into the
changed conditions (within their experience) exhibited by the children in the schools.
Any observer who is old enough to recall the appearance of the poorer London
children half a century ago, when the London School Board was only just beginning
to make its influence felt; in the days of unregulated child labour, of boy bootblacks
and child crossing sweepers ; the days of " ragged schools," when bare feet
were the rule, and frostbite, ophthalmia, running ears, enlarged glands resulting