What can the Third World learn from the health improvements of Victorian Britain?
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 962 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1136/pgmj.2005.033506
ISSN1469-0756
Autores Tópico(s)Global Healthcare and Medical Tourism
ResumoIn 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, nearly 50% of deaths are caused by infectious disease.2
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