London (Ancient and Modern) from the Sanitary and Medical Point of View

Chapter 2: PREFACE.

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About This Book

This work surveys London's sanitary conditions and medical history, contrasting ancient and modern periods. It examines geographic and environmental factors, water supply, and the accumulation of refuse, then discusses medieval health, pleasure grounds, mortality statistics, subsequent improvements, and persistent sanitation gaps. The medical history portion traces the evolution of practitioners and institutions, the separation of medicine and surgery, early regulatory acts and the College of Physicians, responses to plague and quackery, the development of anatomy teaching and apothecaries, the growth of hospitals and pharmacopeias, and the rise of modern medical schools with London as a centre for clinical study.

PREFACE.

This little book is an expansion of two addresses delivered in January, 1889.

One of these addresses, which deals with the Sanitary Aspects of Ancient and Modern London, was given in the Parkes Museum of the Sanitary Institute, and was written for a mixed audience. The other formed the subject of the annual address to the Students’ Medical Society at University College, London, and was written for an audience which might be expected to have a special interest in the History of Medicine in London.

Both have already appeared in print; the first in Public Health, the journal of the Society of Medical Officers of Health; and the second in the Lancet. For the loan of most of the woodcuts the author is indebted to the Publishers of the Lancet, who kindly undertook, when the lecture was appearing in their columns, to illustrate it with five illustrations, which were made especially for the purpose. One illustration has been supplied by the proprietors of Public Health, and four have been borrowed from “Cassell’s Old and New London.”