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9
But Public Health ! It may yet be asked, What is it ? It is quite
within the period of living memory when this term was comparatively
little known, and as little understood. The time has not long passed
away when Towns and Cities grew, commerce was developed, and
wealth amassed, people aggregated and congregated together in masses
at their will, and although Corporations and Town Councils assembled
to administer Corporate Laws for general purposes, the health of
individuals comprising these great communities was neither the subject
of special legislation nor special care.
At length the value of individual life became apparent, and the
first Public Health Act (1848) sprang into existence.
How needful was this measure, the then discovered statistics of our
large Towns immediately declared. The birth-rate and the death-rate
of the people were put side by side. The fatality attending sickness in
one Town was placed against the comparative immunity from sickness
and mortality in another and the causes tending to one or the other
result were studied and proclaimed. It needed but a little fanning of
this flame to produce a light throughout the country, still every year
increasing in intensity until now when individual freedom is made
subservient to the public good.
The law which has always made the Englishman feel entitled to do
what he likes with his own, is not destroyed but merely ciroumvented
with- an equally beneficent proviso, sic utere tuo ut alienum non Iadas.
In other words" so use your own that you damage none other in
doing so."
Public Health ! it means the physical welfare of both large and small
communities, and its study suggests the laws which must be followed
to secure the aggregate of good to all alike. The law of 1848, however,
whilst recognizing as its name implied the importance of Public Health
was found as might have been expected lamentably unequal to the
task, and its clumsy machinery soon broke down.
The true light had not yet shone upon the framers of Public Health
Bills, neither does it appear even in the early part of 1855, when
sanitary reform was actively engaging the attention of Parliament that
the great fulcrum of Sanitary legislation had been in anyway recognized.
Medical Science seemed all but ignored. Engineering skill was the
rock on which Public Health was made to stand. The disposal of sewage
was pre-eminent, the necessity for medical supervision was not recognized.
The first Sanitary Reform Bill of Sir B. Hall had the fundamental
defect of that it was designed to supplant, and its utter
incapability for doing the work it was intended for, soon became
apparent. In this also Medical Science held only a very subsidiary
position. Well might the Lancet write:— "It will, at some future
„time, be referred to as a remarkable example of the little progress
„that Sanitary Science had made even amongst the educated portions
„of the community that in 1855 a "Bill for the Preservation of the
„ Public Health" was introduced into Parliament, which, in designating