Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

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Whether the British race is improving or degenerating?  What, if it seem probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil?  How they can be, if not destroyed, at least arrested?  These are questions worthy attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and mother in these isles.  I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay; and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught—the rudiments of it at least—in every school, college, and university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly.  But they were hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived.  They may have been able to say of themselves—as they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude: “What comyn folk of all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity?  What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?”  They may have been fed on “great shins of beef,” till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini calls them, “the English wild beasts.”  But they increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries.  Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in “the survival of the fittest,” cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.

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And if any say, as they have a right to say—“But these are subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public lectures;” I rejoin—of course not, unless they are taught by women—by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified.  Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost any man.  This is one of the main reasons why I have, for twenty years past, advocated the training of women for the medical profession; and one which countervails, in my mind, all possible objections to such a movement.  And now, thank God, we are seeing the common sense of Great Britain, and indeed of every civilised nation, gradually coming round to that which seemed to me, when I first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save in secret—the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrust out during the sixteenth century.

I am most happy to see, for instance, that the National Health Society, 3 which I earnestly recommend to the attention of my readers, announces a “Course of Lectures for Ladies on Elementary Physiology and Hygiene,” by a lady, to which I am also most happy to see, governesses are admitted at half-fees.  Alas! how much misery, disease, and even death might have been prevented, had governesses been taught such matters thirty years ago, I, for one, know too well.  May the day soon come when there will be educated women enough to give such lectures throughout these realms, to rich as well as poor—for the rich, strange to say, need them often as much as the poor do—and that we may live to see, in every great town, health classes for women as well as for men, sending forth year by year more young women and young men taught, not only to take care of themselves and of their families, but to exercise moral influence over their fellow-citizens, as champions in the battle against dirt and drunkenness, disease and death.

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