CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

HYGEIA: A MODEL CITY OF HEALTH.

A remarkable attempt has been made to bringinto one focus numerous suggestions put forth,within the last few years by social improversand sanitary reformers. These suggestions, asour readers are aware, take a very wide range.Matters relating to water-supply, drainage, disposalof refuse, lighting, ventilation, dry foundationsand dry walls to houses, stoves and fireplaces,cookery and kitchen arrangements, washing anddrying appliances, cleanliness of person and ofgarments, cleanliness of rooms and of bedding,special arrangements for unwholesome but necessarytrades and employments, provision for thesick that may not be perilous to other persons,moderation in diet and regimen, avoidance ofvicious indulgences—all these and many othersubjects have engaged the attention of thoughtfulpersons in a marked degree; and it can be indisputablyshewn that the annual death-rate is loweredin districts where improvements in such mattershave been extensively adopted. Mr Edwin Chadwick,perhaps the chief worker in this laudabledirection, is so confident in the eventual success ofsuch endeavours, that he announces the possibilityof building a city that shall have any assignabledeath-rate or annual mortality, from a maximumof fifty or more in a thousand to a minimum offive or less in a thousand. Dr B. W. Richardson,a physician and physiologist of eminence, hastaken hold of Mr Chadwick's idea, and sketchedthe plan of a city that shall shew the lowest rateof mortality. No such city—we need hardly say—exists,and he has neither the time nor themeans to build one; but his purpose is to shewthat it can be done, whenever public opinion isripe for it.

Dr Richardson, in an Address to the SocialScience Association, afterwards published in aseparate form, speaks of his Hygeia or City ofHealth in the present tense, as if it already existed.This is done for vividness of description and brevityof language, and will be understood by the readerin the proper sense.

Hygeia, then, is a city for a hundred thousandinhabitants. (The main principles could be workedout in a much smaller community, but in a le

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