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.

    23/600 (page 11)
    admissions into asylums of cases of certain well marked and definite forms of insanity. The main cause of the increase of registered lunatics is thus to be sought for in improved registra- tion and parochial and family convenience. If there is an actual increase, and there is reason for believing that there is a slight actual increase, it is due to the tendency of the population to gravitate towards towns and cities, where the conditions of health are inferior to those of rural life, and where there is therefore a greater disposition to disease of all kinds. But a loud cry has arisen in England, which within the last few months has increased to a shriek, that another baneful in- fluence is rapidly sapping the foundations of public health. Dr Crichton Browne, in a report to the Education Department upon the alleged over-pressure of work in Public Elementary Schools, informs us as the result of his investigations that the seeds of disease are being sown broadcast by the schoolmaster. We are led to infer from this report that water on the brain, various diseases of the kidney and heart, insanity, and suicide are increas- ing year by year, and that the main cause of this increase is over- pressure in Elementary Schools. This authority, I should premise, asserts that there is no over-pressure in Scotland ; but I deny that his experience is such as to warrant any expression of opinion as regards this question; for his experience in Scotland is confined to five small schools in a purely agricultural district in Dumfries- shire, attended by children of Scotch parentage, belonging to the farming and peasant class. It is quite unfair to col- late such experience with that derived from observation of schools situated in the lowest parts of London, attended by children drawn from the substratum of society. I repeat Dr Crichton Browne's experience in Scotland is of no value as aff'ord- ing a standard of comparison with the state of matters in England. In order to have gained anything like equivalent experience he should have visited Board Schools in the large Scotch cities. In London he examined 6500 children, most of whom were resident in the poorest and most squalid districts of the metropolis, and the results of his investigations are of the most sensational