Volume 2

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    224/600 (page 14)
    cases of this description. Certainly more than one has come to my own knowledge. I need not say that if cases of this sort occur in the upper ranks of society, they are still more liable to occur amongst the labouring and working classes. I can hardly conceive that the magnitude of the consequences which may result from carelessness in this matter is fully realised. A child who is sent to school from a house in which there is a case of scarlet fever, may carry (observe I do not say will carry) the fever poison with it; some of its fellow pupils may contract the disease; some of them may die; the schooolmaster or schoolmistress will certainly be caused gTave mental anxiety; the school may have to be shut up, the house repapered and repainted, serious pecuniary loss may in consequence be inflicted on those who are perhaps little able to bear it, for I need not say that schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are not, as a rule, wealthy people. These consequences are serious; they are surely sufficiently serious to necessitate the most scrupulous care on the part of all concerned; but I would be giving you a very inadequate and imperfect idea of the m^agnitude of the evils which may, and which sometimes do actually result, if I were to stop here. I may perhaps enable you to realise more vividly what these results may be, if I make use of a comparison. During the past few years we have from time to time been startled by the accounts of one of those dreadful dynamite explosions, which, thanks to a kind providence, have happily, I think I am right in saying, been miraculously un- attended with any loss of human life. Now, suppose that a parent, either through ignorance, or carelessness, or culpable negligence, were to send a child to school with its pockets filled with dynamite; suppose that dynamite were to explode, to wreck the building, and to kill both teachers and scholars, would not a thrill of horror reverberate from one end to the other of the civilised world ? And supposing that such a catastrophe were to occur again and again, would not the nation rise as one man and demand that the most stringent measures be immediately taken to prevent the possibility of the recurrence ? ISTow I speak with- out any exaggeration when I say that the evil which may