Chapter 3

SANITARY OFFICE.Dec. 25, 1977.

SANITARY OFFICE.

Dec. 25, 1977.

The proceedings of this most high and solemn Court in the Realm were, as usual, held withclosed doors. There were present five Lord Doctors, and sentences were passed, after due deliberation, and (it is rumoured) the application of the Question, ordinary and extraordinary, on nine obstinate heretics. Three of these were members of that fanatical sect, the Peculiar People, who refuse to consult physicians on the ground of religious scruples—an instance of the survival of outworn superstitions scarcely credible in this enlightenedAge of Science. One of these miserable delinquents, named John Nokes, alleged that his twelve children had enjoyed unbroken health till his youngest little boy cut his finger. The wretched father, instead of hurrying instantly for the nearest surgeon, himself dressed the child’s wound (which appears to have been superficial) with adhesive plaster, and gave the child a fragment of toffee to stop his crying, in lieu of the proper therapeutic remedies for the shock to the nervous system which any medical attendant would have exhibited. The crime came fortunately to the knowledge of the police, who immediately brought the matter before the Sanitary Office. A second offender of the same sect, named Styles, had, it seems, an attack of Podagra, but took no advice, and having rather quickly recovered, was in hopes (it is supposed) that his neglect to obey the law would pass undiscovered. A crutch seen in his room raised the suspicion of a visitor, and the offender was eventually arrested. When interrogated by the Lord Presiding Doctor of the Sanitary Court as to the motives of his crime, the man (as his sentence sets forth) actually dared to reply by quoting a passage from an obsolete book, wherein it is narrated of a certain King, “Now Asawas diseased in his feet, yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”[1]This narrative, as Styles had the audacity to argue, was an authentic, and, indeed, inspired report of a fit of the gout—its diagnosis, treatment, and the result. As he did not desire to “sleep with his fathers,” he (Styles) had avoided consulting the physicians, and had endeavoured to consult the Lord by following the dictates of common sense, and the consequence was that he had recovered with unusual rapidity. The Lord President was moved to great indignation by the obduracy of this heretic. He remarked that the book which contained such a passage—a volume which, he was happy to say, he had, for his part, never read—ought to be burnt before the doors of the London University; and as to the prisoner Styles, it would be useless for him to hope to escape sharing in the same combustion.

1. 2 Chron. xvi. 12.

After the Peculiar People, two Homœopaths were found guilty—one of administering globules to an old woman, the other of refusing to join in the processions on the 5th of November, when the busts of Hahnemann are carried to be calcined. The remaining four heretics avowed belief in as many different heinous errors. One gave credit toMichel’sprocess for the cure of external cancer, another thought new-born infants ought not to be dosed with castor oil; a third placed confidence in bone-setters, and the fourth (a very old lady) retained an infatuated preference for the remedies which were in vogue a century ago—bromide of potassium and chloral—which, ofcourse, have been since peremptorily condemned and pronounced highly injurious by the supreme authority of the Faculty.

The aforesaid nine heretics, having been solemnly found “guilty,” after due inquisition by the High Sanitary Office, were condemned as contumacious by the Lord Presiding Doctor, and the Most Eminent Doctors Pole, Gardiner, and Bonner, and were delivered over last night to the Secular Arm. Piles are in process of erection in Trafalgar Square. It is announced that Her Gracious Majesty Queen Mary III. will preside at the execution, which will take place on Sunday morning next, after hearing a Lecture on “True Medical Belief,” to be delivered by Her Majesty’s Medical Confessor in Ordinary, Dr. Torr Quemada, under the dome of St. Paul’s.

Such is a brief abstract of these most astoundingLaw and Police Reportsin theAge of Science. We make no comments upon them, except the expression of our wonder at the similarity between the office and behaviour of a Priest of Religion in the fifteenth century and a Priest of Science in the twentieth. With complete citations of four out of the twenty-five Leading Articles of theAge of Science, we must conclude this imperfect but thoroughly reliable account of the remarkable journal of 1977, whose discovery has been the glorious first-fruits of theProspective Telegraph.

Since the epoch, now nearly forty years past, whenSmithmade his immortal discovery of the Army Exterminator, followed up so rapidly byJones’invention of the Fleet Annihilator, international policy has necessarily undergone a great modification. As war has become impossible as anultima ratioin any case, and the principle of Arbitration, on which such hopes were founded, has proved ineffective, in consequence of the general refusal of the working classes to permit their governments to pay theamendesagreed upon by the Arbitrators, a permanent state of discord between nations seems to have become established. The dream of Free Trade having also been exploded, following the example of the American Empire, at that time a Republic, (prohibitive duties having been placed by the different States on their own exports and the imports of other countries,) commerce is undoubtedly, just now, considerably hampered. The immense facilities for travelling which we possess, thanks to the æro-magnetic propeller, have also their disadvantages, since the abandonment of extradition treaties allows the criminals of each country to take refuge immediately in the neighbouring State, when they happen to entertain any serious objection to detention in the Penal Hospitals. For all these drawbacks to our progress, however,Sciencewill no doubt soon provide an efficient remedy.

We are on the high-road, it cannot be doubted,to a period of prosperity and universal longevity (after all, the main object of all rational ambition) such as the world has not hitherto beheld.

The foreign news of the hour is somewhat unsatisfactory. In consequence of the generally lawless condition of the Southern Russian Republics, the great corn districts of those regions have for some years been falling out of cultivation; and no hopes are entertained that we shall be able to import any more grain from Odessa, or indeed from any quarter of the world. In a similar way, the native rulers to whom we restored what was formerly called our Indian Empire, and also China after its brief occupation, have so far adopted American and European ideas as to place for this next year such duties on rice and tea as will almost prohibit the importation of those articles into the English market, while they have positively forbidden the introduction of English cotton or iron into their respective States. The bad and deceptive quality of the goods furnished by our manufacturers is the alleged cause of these unfortunate regulations.Sciencewill, no doubt, ere long enable us to supply the deficiencies thus caused both in our Commissariat and the income hitherto derived from manufacture; but, for the present, some anxiety is naturally felt in commercial circles regarding these untoward events. Against all mishaps, however, we rejoice to set the announcement—which will be greeted with universal exultation—thatthe researches of the learned Professor Coppervale respecting the animalculæ causing the Vine Disease, the Silk-worm Disease, and the Potato Disease, have resulted in the glorious discovery of a method of conveying the infection with absolute scientific certainty from a plant or insect which has been attacked to another still healthy. In this manner the vineyards of Château La Rose and of Château Yquem have both been effectively inoculated by the processes recommended by the English Professor to the French Director of Agriculture; and the result is perfectly satisfactory. Not a grape on either ground was available during the last vintage for wine-making. In the words, then, of an illustrious philosopher of last century, “From this vantage ground already won we look forward with confident hope to the triumph of science over all the loss and misery which the human race has experienced.” Anyone who has eaten a grape infected with thephylloxeraaccording to Professor Coppervale’s stupendous discovery, will have enjoyed a foretaste of the triumph of Science in ages to come.

Considerable excitement prevails just now in many of our large towns in consequence of the needful, but somewhat troublesome, formalities required by law before any trade or handicraft may be exercised. Blacksmiths’ apprentices, we are told, very generally resent the necessity of passingtheir proper examinations in Metallurgy before they are qualified to shoe a horse; and the Artificial Flower Makers constantly evade attendance at the lectures on Botany, given expressly for their benefit. The candidates for licenses as Cabdrivers have more than once exhibited signs of discontent, when rejected on the grounds that they failed to answer some of the simplest examination questions on the principles of Mechanics applied to Traction, and on the correlation of Heat and Motion, as discovered by the illustrious author of “Heat as a Mode of Motion.” A strike (it is even rumoured) is impending among the stonemasons and bricklayers and slaters in a certain large city, because the Police, at the order of the Magistrates, having brought up several members of those trade-unions to the Local Examining Board for inquiry, it was elicited that none of them had acquired a competent knowledge of Geology in general, nor even of the formation of the strata of rocks wherewith their proper business is concerned.

These difficulties were to be anticipated in the progress of Scientific knowledge among the masses, and we earnestly hope that no proposal to relax the late very wise legislation will be made in Parliament, but rather to reinforce the existing Acts by severer penalties upon ignorance and inattention. Who can for a moment think, for example, of allowing his shirt to be washed by a person who knows nothing of the chemistry of soap, blue, andstarch? or his dinner cooked by a man who (however skilled in the mere kitchen art of sending up appetising dishes) is totally ignorant of how much albumen, salts, and alkalies go to the formation of vegetable and animal diet?

A kindred subject of unreasonable popular dissatisfaction are the Medical Certificates of good Health now legally required from men, women, and children performing any kind of labour in factories, warehouses, shops, fields, ships, or in domestic service. Obviously it is impossible to certify the health of any individual for more than a few days at a time, and the necessity which the recent Act enforces of obtaining a fresh certificate (and, of course, paying the doctor for it) every week, is felt by discontented persons as a burden unfairly laid upon them by the State. We regret that the process is, in truth, slightly troublesome and expensive (theminimumfee for the humbler trades is, as our readers are aware, half-a-crown; for exercising the higher professions—artists, merchants, lawyers, &c.—5s.), but it was recognised so long ago as 1876 as a right principle of legislation in the case of factory works, and it now forms so legitimate a source of regular income to a large body of most respectable medical gentlemen, who make it their business to grant certificates, that we cannot imagine anyone being so ill-advised as to suggest the repeal of the law. Of course the number of persons thus excluded from the labourmarket is very considerable indeed, but we must accept such a consequence as inevitable. Since cripples were rejected a century ago for the office of schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, the practice has been constantly followed of placing restrictions upon the feeble attempts at industry of persons labouring under natural defects and disabilities, and the Blind, for example, are no longer allowed to compete with the seeing in making mats and baskets. For all such wretched people there are open the proper asylums, the Hospital for the diseased, and the Workhouse for the feeble, the maimed, the deaf, and the blind. Charity itself can ask no more. The resistance of these unfortunates against entering these institutions must be put down. The world is, after all, made for the strong—the strong in mind, and the strong in body; and the notion that it is our business to “bear each other’s burdens” belonged altogether to an Unscientific age. What if physicians and surgeonsdotry experiments daily on the patients in the hospitals, sometimes involving a good deal of pain, or loss of limb or life? These people are fed and housed, and often extravagantly fattened up on the most luxurious food, on the condition of serving the cause of Science as subjects of experiments. And what, again, if the children in the workhouses be given over now and then by the Guardians, at the request of the Medical authorities, for vivisection? They are nearly always placed under the influenceof anæsthetics, indeed, we may say invariably so, unless the object of the experiment would be frustrated by their use. Could the humanest of our humanitarians ask anything more? The rule ofScienceis the most benign, as well as enlightened, the world has ever seen.

The sanitary interests of the community are now recognized on all hands as the supreme concern of the State, as the care of his own health and the prolongation of life at all costs are the chief ends of each individual man. We therefore commence our yearly review by noting in what manner the advance ofScience, (in which lies our only hope,) has contributed during the past twelvemonth towards this grand object.

The foremost place of honour is, of course, due to the discovery of the eminent Dr. Howlem of the scientific way to give Cholera; after which we may reckon Dr. Mowlem’s short method of conveying the Plague; and last, Dr. Bowlem’s most interesting and valuable plan for producing Leprosy. These immense discoveries (effected, it is needless to remark, by laborious pathological experiments on animals and idiots) may well make the past year memorable in the annals of the Science of Medicine; and though the particular specific remedies for the diseases in question have not yet been ascertained by the Faculty, we can scarcely fail to attain that secondary objectere long, together with the proper treatment of Consumption, Scarlet Fever, and other maladies which Science has been able to convey for the last hundred years, andmustere long find out how to cure.

Next in importance to actual discovery we are inclined to place the new Regulations which Parliament has laid down in obedience to the High Court of Convocation. The absolute prohibition to Women to read or write—even in cases where they may have formerly acquired those arts (now recognised as so unsuitable to their sex)—will, we apprehend, tell importantly on the health of infants, and of course eventually on that of the community. So long as females indulged in no more deleterious practices than dancing in hot rooms all night, unclothing their necks and chests, wearing thin slippers which exposed their feet to deadly chills, and tightening their waists till their ribs were crushed inwards, the Medical Profession very properly left them to follow their own devices with but little public remonstrance. The case was altered, however, when, three or four generations ago, a considerable movement was made for what was then called the Higher Education of women. The feeble brains of young females were actually taxed to study the now forgotten Greek and Latin languages, and even Mathematics and such Natural Science as was then understood. The result was truly alarming; for these poor creatures flungthemselves with such energy into the pursuits opened to them, that, as one of their critics remarked, they resembled “the palmer-worm and the canker-worm—they devoured every green thing”—and not seldom surpassed their masculine competitors. At length they began to aim at entering the learned Professions—the Legal, and even the Medical. Our readers may be inclined to doubt the latter fact, which seems to involve actual absurdity, but there is evidence that there once existed two or three Lady Doctors in London, who, like Pope Joan in Rome, foisted themselves surreptitiously into an exalted position from which Nature should have debarred them. Of course it was the solemn duty of the Medical Profession to put a stop at once to an error which might lead to such a catastrophe, and numerous books were immediately written proving (what we all now acknowledge) that the culture of the brains of women is highly detrimental to their proper functions in the community; and, in short, that the more ignorant a woman may be, the more delightful she is as a wife, and the better qualified to fulfil the duties of a mother.

SinceSciencehas thoroughly gained the upper hand over Religious and other prejudices, the position of women, we are happy to say, has been steadily sinking, and the dream of a Higher Education has been replaced by the abolition of even Elementary Schools for girls, and now bythe final Act of last Session, which renders it penal for any woman to read a hook or newspaper, or to write a letter. We anticipate the very happiest results from this thoroughly sound and manly legislation.

The last sanitary event to which we need at present advert is the new law by which, on the certificate of any single Medical Graduate that a person is Insane, the police will be called on immediately to arrest and consign him to such mad-house as the Medical graduate shall appoint. The magistrate by whose order the arrest is made is left no option as to obeying the Medical graduate’s certificate, and we are glad also to see that, by another clause in the Act, the only remaining difficulty connected with these Asylums has been removed. None but a Medical graduate, responsible only to the great Medical Trades Union Council, is henceforth eligible to the office of Inspector of any Lunatic Asylum throughout the kingdom, nor can any Justice of the Peace grant an order for admittance or search, except to such a graduate. These wise and reasonable regulations will afford much satisfaction to the Medical gentlemen who have undertaken the arduous but not unprofitable profession of managers and proprietors of Lunatic Asylums.

Our prognostics of last New Year’s Day have been amply justified by the Summary of Crime forthe past twelvemonth, which has just been published, according to the excellent recent appointment of the Registrar General of Offences. Crimes of the lesser class, such as murders, poisonings, electroding and exploding, have indeed increased considerably in number, and perhaps also in the degree of recklessness and violence exhibited by the offenders; but on the other hand, as we prophesied, those crimes which involve so much larger evils to the community—the detestable Homœopathic and Hydropathic heresies, Infidelity respecting the sacred doctrine of Evolution, neglect of Schooling, and neglect of Equination, Vaccination, Canination, and Porcination, have dwindled under the severe measures of punishment which we urged for so long on a too lax legislature, but which have at last been thoroughly enforced. We may really hope to see a few years hence the Reign ofScienceso complete that no man, woman, or child in the land will presume to whisper a doubt on any subject on which the Sanitary Office has pronounced, or attempt to evade the seasons appointed by authority for receiving the Rites above mentioned. The Act passed at the end of the last century, whereby certificates of Vaccination were substituted for all legal purposes for Baptismal certificates, was the first step towards the happy order of things under which we now have the privilege to dwell.

Lest our readers should feel a not wholly unnatural anxiety, founded on the admitted increaseof the lesser crimes to which we have adverted, we wish to remind them that such an occurrence was inevitable on the final collapse of Religion, and that we must be content to wait till Science shall have had time to substitute some more effectual checks on human passions than it has yet been in our power to apply. It is too obvious to need remark that since men have learned that Death is the end of their existence, they must be expected to seize more hastily and resolutely every pleasure which life may offer, nay, that it would be absurd and unscientific to expect them to do otherwise. Let us do justice to the old effete superstition, and admit that the delusive notion that an invisible Being watched human actions, loved good men, and would punish bad ones in another world, if not in the present, was calculated to exercise considerable influence of a beneficial sort on ordinary minds. Certain types of character (not now, of course, to be found in the world) seem to have flourished under the fictitious charm of these antique ideas—characters exhibiting a certain courage and unselfishness, of which it is scarcely possible to read without some little regret that they are not conformable with sounder philosophic views of the nature and destiny of man. People had, we must remember, in former days, four distinct motives for doing good instead of evil. First, they believed in an omnipotent Lord and Master whom they called“God.” 2nd, they believed in a sacred internal Guide whom they called Conscience; and 3rd, they believed in a peculiar principle of action which they called Honour. After all these came the Criminal Law, ready to punish those who neglected what were deemed to be loftier motives. Now we, in this gloriousAge of Science, must remember that of all these four incentives to virtue only one remains. We know there is no God, or, at least, that, if there be, he is Unknown and Unknowable; and we are persuaded that Conscience is merely the inherited prejudice of our barbarous ancestors in favour of the class of actions which were found conducive to the welfare of the tribe. As to the Law of Honour, men had already begun to forget what it signified a hundred years ago, when the Age ofSciencewas just dawning, for we find at that epoch a writer of considerable pretensions, in a periodical called theFortnightly Review, actually asserting that its standard “is submission not to Law but to Opinion ... deference to the opinion of a particular class.” Up to that period we think it was universally understood by “honourable” persons to signify, quite on the contrary, Reverence for an inward standard of rectitude, truth, and generosity; for a man’s own private sense of Honour and self-respect, which he would not forfeit to gain the applause of a world. In our time, of course, it is needless to say that all these fine ideal sentiments have goneutterly out of vogue, and, having left them behind us, we have only the Criminal Law on which to rely for the protection of life and property. It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short-sighted philosophers of the last century to “labour for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old Historic Religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of the Astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion) since the Solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes—as come it must—when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct—when the icy seas flow no longer, and the pallid Sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked like the Moon in eternal frost and lifelessness—what, in that day predicted so surely by Science, will avail all the works, and hopes, and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be for ever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleriesof pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless for evermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them; and no mind in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as Man.Thisis whatScienceteaches us unerringly to expect,—and in view of it, who shall talk to us of “labouring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognised as a dream, wherein no man in a Scientific Age can long indulge.

There is, then, but one Method on which we can rely to repress human passions and hold together the somewhat brittle chain of Society. That method is the Scientific Treatment of Crime, under such conditions as careful investigation and experiments may prove to be best suited to effect its cure. We can hold out no supersensual motives to theMindsof the multitude, but we can treat theirBodiesin the very best manner possible to render them virtuous and industrious citizens. It is true that as yet the results of our efforts in this direction have not been very satisfactory. The salutary processes employed in the Penal Hospitals under the most eminent physicians have not been altogether crowned with success; and crime of the violent kind increases year by year almost in geometrical proportion. Nevertheless, it wouldill become any of us who have the privilege to live in this enlightened age to entertain a shadow of a doubt that our Scientific method is the right one, and that by-and-by (while we respectfully wait the results of their experiments) our great Medical men will discover the proper remedies for murder, rape, and robbery. For our own part, it is superfluous to assure our readers, we retain unwavering, unbounded faith in the resources ofScienceto provide a perfect substitute for Religion, for Conscience, and for Honour.

J. OGDEN AND CO., PRINTERS, 172, ST. JOHN STREET, E.C.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSilently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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