A City of Health

At the Brighton meeting of the British Social Science Association, Dr. B. W. Richardson described an ideal city, so constructed and governed as to reduce the deaths in the first generation to [...] per 1,000, and in the succeeding generations to 5 per 1,000 each. The arrangements are made for 100,000 people. They live in 20,000 houses on 1,100 acres of land. The highest houses have four stories of 15 feet each, but the residences have mostly two or three stories. No cellars or under ground rooms are permitted, the cellarage being taken up with arched subways communicating with similar subways in the streets. For construction, glazed bricks are used to prevent the absorption of water into the walls during storms. The bricks are perforated so that currents of air pass through the walls. Inside, neither paint, paper, nor plaster is used, the bricks being laid so evenly that their glazed sides form a level enamelled wall. The kitchen and similar offices are on the top floor, smoke being taken down through shafts to central chimneys, where it is passed through a gas furnace to produce complete combustion of its carbon. The hot water boiler being at the top of the house, every room has hot and cold water without stint. Bedrooms have 1,000 cubic feet of space to each person, and no unnecessary articles of furniture or spare clothing are allowed in them.

The streets have subways under the pavement, and on one of these runs a car track for heavy traffic. This subway construction, combined with the open arches under the houses, gives a maximum of cleanliness, economy, and health in the management of water and gas distribution and of sewerage. Twenty hospitals, of one to 5,000 people, are scattered at equal distances through the city. Public laundries are under the direct control of the sanitary officers, the washing of clothing in promiscuous masses being considered a fruitful cause of disease. The inhabitants are not obliged to have their washing done out of the house, but the laundry business, so far as it is patronized, is under strict surveillance. For similar reasons tailors and other mechanics are not allowed to do their work at home, buildings being provided for them. In the city neither liquor nor tobacco is sold. The dead are disposed of by burial, but the cemetery ground is filled with highly carbonaceous earth, coffins are forbidden, and a heavy growth of trees is kept up.

In this city the author thinks infantile diseases, typhus, typhoid, puerperal, hospital, rheumatic and other fevers, and all the train of alcoholic complaints, would be wholly or almost unknown. Small-pox would be under complete control, while consumption and parasitic diseases would be greatly lessened. Over pneumonia, bronchitis, summer complaints, and the round of children's diseases the new city would have less control. It will be observed that the author considers it impossible to secure the greatest health by any system of construction if the people are left to arrange their own habits of life. He therefore calls on the aid of government to prevent overcrowding, filthy habits, and the communication of disease by clothing. It has been calculated that if the death-rate could be reduced to an average of 8 per 1,000 the average expectation of life would be raised to 60 years, and the probable mean duration of life would be 120 years, while old people would live to 160. With a death rate of 5 per 1,000 the expectation of life would be 137 years, the probable mean duration 100 years, and old people 250 years would be found. Dr. Richardson, however, did not raise this expectation above 90 years as the average length of life. The effect upon population of such a death-rate would be simply revolutionary. England has had for thirty-five years a mean birth rate of 33.6 per 1,000. With a loss of 5 per 1,000 the increase would evidently be 23.8, and in five years "Hygeia," or the city of health, would gain 15,310 inhabitants by natural increase. If immediately built it would double its population before the end [...]