HOUSES, OR MORE HOSPITALS?

The provision of hygienic housing is very properly the concern of the Ministry of Health. Last year gave us the Ministry, and this year we want the health. Meanwhile we are offered not health but hospitals, a very different boon, and derived from a very different train of thought. The Housing Department of the Ministry has hitherto been content to pass plans for scores of thousands of houses which involve the production of smoke, aerial pollution, obstruction of daylight, and all the diseases of darkness, headed by tuberculosis, against which the Ministry promises us a great co-ordinated campaign.

At the eleventh hour, however, the Minister of Health has seen fit to appoint a Departmental Committee on Air Pollution by Smoke and other Noxious Vapours, under the chairmanship of Lord Newton, who introduced a bill dealing with the industrial chimney into Parliament before the war. Those of us who have given evidence before that Committee know, however, that it is fully aware of the urgent importance of the domestic chimney in relation to our new houses, and now we welcome the report, which implicitly condemns practically all the houses the plans for which have been already approved by another department sitting under the same august roof in Whitehall. If Dr. Addison decides that, in view of the report presented by a committee of his own choosing and appointment, he must reconsider the existing plans and determine future ones, so that all the houses for which he is responsible as Minister of Health shall be compatible with those primary needs of health, light and clean air, he may be assured that educated public opinion will support and thank him. In the present alarming plight of our hospitals, the Ministry proposes to build large numbers of new general hospitals and sanatoria for our dreadful and increasing host of consumptives. If Dr. Addison will make a beginning of the end of the plague-cloud over our cities, he will function as a Minister of Health indeed. Let us make our cities fit to live in by readmitting to them the air and light of heaven. In the discussion following my recent lecture to the Sociological Society, a visitor from New York, with which I have been reproaching London since last July, and which has lately recorded a wonderful reduction in the consumptive deathrate, told us that the physicians of that city are now preferring to retain for their consumptive patients the advantages of treatment at home, rather than send them – as when New York burnt soft coal – to Arizona or the Adirondacks. Why should London and the other blackened pities of our land remain filthy and pestiferous when New York has made itself clean and habitable? It may be argued whether or not we should follow America and make England “dry,” but where is the champion of dirt and darkness, disease and death who will deny that it is time to make England clean? Our first Minister of Health, at the beginning of his creative work, cannot do better than remember that, “In the beginning … God said, ‘Let there be Light.’”