REVIEW
What can the Third World learn from the health improvements of Victorian Britain?*
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor G C Cook
11 Old London Road, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL1 1QE; admin@fpm-uk.org
Keywords: history; Third World
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In 1904 (some three years after the Victorian era had come to a close), Sir George Clarke KCMG, late Secretary to the Colonial Defence Committee, wrote to the editor of the Times: "The bacteriologists have made our flesh creep. We have been taught to expect ptomains in food, bacilli in the running brooks, and germs in everything". He continued: "We know the elaborate precautions taken in all well-managed hospitals to avert septic conditions". And he ended his letter: "We must either modify the germ theory of disease, or ... regard the dust [my italics] of a great city, with hospitals and diseased persons in its midst, much more seriously than has been our custom hitherto."1 Clarke was thus highlighting the fact that the (urban) environment in London was heavily contaminated; this had been the case in Victorian Britain, and remains the case in all Third World countries—where even today,
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