ecent French
histories.

The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long series of
victories, and these may well be studied in Great Britain and the United
States. In the former, though there had been many warnings from eminent
physicians, and above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
from men like Caius, Mead, and Pringle, the result was far short of
what might have been gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that
a systematic sanitary effort was begun in England by the public
authorities. The state of things at that time, though by comparison
with the Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been
gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but among
the poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy-seven thousand paupers in London
during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen thousand were suffering from
fever, and of these nearly six thousand from typhus. In many other parts
of the British Islands the sanitary condition was no better. A noble
body of men grappled with the problem, and in a few years one of these
rose above his fellows--the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to his
work was bitter, and, though many churchmen aided him, the support given
by theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was very far short of what
it should have been. Too many of them were occupied in that most costly
and most worthless of all processes, "the saving of souls" by the
inculcation of dogma. Yet some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of
the lesser clergy did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one of
them, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for his struggle
to make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry.

Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of the Board of
Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal; but from one point
or another, during forty years, he fought the opposition, developed the
new work, and one of the best exhibits of its results is shown in his
address before the Sanitary Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this
and other perfectly trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the
triumph of the scientific over the theological method of dealing with
disease, whether epidemic or sporadic.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century the annual mortality of
London is estimated at not less than eighty in a thousand; about the
middle of this century it stood at twenty-four in a thousand; in 1889
it stood at less tha