Book excerpt: Excerpt from The British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, Vol. 23: Or Quarterly Journal of Practical Medicine and Surgery; January-April, 1859 N otwithstanding all that has been said and written in this country upon sani tary subjects during the last thirty years, it must be confessed, more especially since the publication of the important work which heads our list, that the know ledge of our sanitary condition as a people is still most indefinite, and that still less defined is our knowledge of the measures best adapted to correct the causes of disease and death which are daily and hourly diminishing the efficiency, as well as curtailing the lives, of English men, women, and children, spreading among them not only physical pain and want, but moral perversion also. It is impossible to go over the publications to which we call attention, and not to feel how much remains to be done both as regards knowledge and practice in the matter of public health. Hitherto, sanitary efforts have been for the most part temporary and spasmodic; an alarm of cholera, or an outbreak of fever in some town or village, has roused the people or the authorities into a sanitary activity, often too great an activity, for the time being; but the cause of alarm disappears, and with it the reforms to which it had given momentary impulse the old nuisances accumulate, and the people return to their old habits, little thinking, that though cholera or fever with their striking effects have gone, the same predisposing causes are still working, with as certain if less palpable power to sap the constitutions of themselves and of their children, and that convulsions, with the whole train of nervous diseases, pulmonary affections, with consumption at their head, are doing far more deadly work among them. That every casual malady, every epidemic of influenza, * every child-bed ailment, every accident, is liable to be rendered more severe, perhaps fatal, by these in uences. Just so did our forefathers five centuries ago. They well knew that filth, impure air and water, were productive of disease, and when the black death of the fourteenth, the sweating sickness of the fifteenth, and the plague of the seventeenth centuries had done their fearful work, then, as now, were sanitary precautions taken, and many if not all the measures of this our nineteenth century resorted to, to be, like them, abandoned, or allowed to slumber, as soon as the present fear had passed away, and the remembrance of the horrors become dimmed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."