be feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly, is now rarely beard of. Curious is it to find that some of the diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought of little account, and for the cure of which, therefore, people rely to their cost on quackery instead of medical science.
This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the United States has been coincident with a marked change in the attitude of the American pulpit as regards the theory of disease. In this country, as in others, down to a period within living memory, deaths due to want of sanitary precautions were constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as "results of national sin," or as "inscrutable Providences." That view has mainly passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of the country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading useful ideas as to the prevention of disease; the religious press has been especially faithful in this respect, carrying to every household more just ideas of sanitary precautions and hygienic living.
In summing up the whole subject, we see in this field another of those great triumphs of scientific modes of thought which are gradually doing so much to evolve in the world a religion which shall be more and more worthy of the goodness of God and of the destiny of man.[1]
- ↑ On the improvement in sanitation in London and elsewhere in the north of Europe, see the editorial and Report of the Conference on Sanitation at Brighton, given in the London Times of August 27, 1888. For the best authorities on the general subject in England, see Sir John Simon on English Sanitary Institutions, 1890; also his published Health Reports for 1887, cited in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1891. See also Parkes's Hygiene, passim. For the great increase of the mean length of life in France under better hygienic conditions, see Rambaud, La Civilisation contemporaine en France, p. 682. For the approach to depopulation at Memphis, under the cesspool system in 1878, see Parkes, Hygiene. American appendix, p. 397. For the facts brought out in the investigation of the departments of the city of New York, by the Committee of the State Senate, see New York Senate documents for 1865. For decrease of death-rate in New York city under the new Board of Health, beginning in 1866, and especially among children, see Buck, Hygiene and Popular Health, New York, 1879, vol. ii, p. 575; and for wise remarks on religious duties during pestilence, see ibid., vol. ii, p. 579. For a contrast between the old and new ideas regarding pestilences, see Charles Kingsley in Fraser's Magazine, Iviii, 134; also the sermon of Dr. Burns in 1875 at the Cathedral of Glasgow, before the Social Science Congress. For a particularly bright and valuable statement of the triumphs of modern sanitation, see Mrs. Plunkett's article in The Popular Science Monthly for June, 1891
