The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1847-05-18 00:00:00

titAtf/ iN A COURT.

I was called upon one morning, in the absence of a
friend, a Dispensary surgeon, to attend a case of Fever in
his district, which I may remark et the outset is one of
the most unhealthy and filthy in the town,—the neighbour-
hood of Vauxhall-road and Marybone,—abounding in
close courts and cellars, principally occupied by the low-
est class of Irish, or used as common lodging-houses for
the accommodation of tramps, street beggars, and labour-

ers. The place to which my direction led me, was a court
in a street—which, for obvious reasons I do not particu-
larise by name—leading from Marybone into Vauxhall-

road ; and, as it may afford to the reader a general idea of
the sort of localities and habitations, too frequently to be

found provided for the use of the poorer inhabitants of
our town, I must briefly describe it, although I am afraid
that I shall thereby render myself liable to the imputa-

tion, from some, of exaggeration.
The approach to the court in question is a low covered
archway, with a step descending from the street into a
passage, containing at the period of my visit,—and I have
no doubt being frequently, if not generally, in that state,
_ _

—an overflow of dirty, half-putrid water, caused by the
imperfection or choking up of some drain. The court
itself contained six or seven houses, inhabited densely
from the cellars to the upper rooms, and was of the des-
cription called a" close court,"—i.e., it had no thorough
way or means of ventilation, the only approach to it, for
air or for its occupants, being the filthy passage described.
By a recent local act, such courts are no longer allowed
to be erected; but many still remain in various parts of
the town, slightly improved of late it is true, but still-
most unwholesome. My patient I found occupying a
front room on the ground floor of one of these houses,—
a room of very small dimensions and in an almost ruinous
state of repair, but which nevertheless served as a sitting,
eating, and sleeping apartment for the whole family, con-
sisting of a man, his wife, and two grown-up girls. The
cellar underneath I found was occasionally tenanted, only,
as it was subject to a similar. overflow of drainage water
to that noticed in the passage ; and at the time of my
visit was in a most filthy state, the smell from it, rising
through the chinks of the flooring and affecting the at-
mosphere
of the room over. The furniture of this
wretched room consisted of a low truckle bedstead, on
which my patient—a man apparently about forty years of
age,—was laid, scantily covered by an old blanket, and
what had been, in its better days, a horse rug. A common
deal table, very tottery in its condition and not too clean,
one broken chair and a stool, or two, with a few cracked
mugs and pans, made up the rest of the collection. Some
straw in a corner appeared to be the only bed for the two
girls. .
The case presented to me I found was one of the fre-
quent ones which occur in such localities, during periods
of epidemic and malaria,—a fever of .the extreme conges-
tion kind, accompanied by the usual symptoms of ap-
proaching collapse, and which, therefore, unless arrested
by prompt treatment, would in all probability hurry off
the unfortunate sufferer very rapidly. I must confess,
however, that when I glanced round the apattment in
which the patient lay, and inhaled the impurities around
me, I felt little confidence in my chance of combatting at
once the disease and the continued action of its accessories.
To afford him air, the window had been opened ; but
alas, if air had been wanted, it was not to be had in that
pent-up court, which far more frequently drew down the
dense and vaporous smoke of the neighbourhood than the
pure breath of heaven. Had the treatment and good
ventilation of an hospital been at my command, I migh
have hoped for a successful result ; but they were not to
be had at that sickly period • and if they had even been
within reach, I found that the strong prejudice, frequently
existing amongst our poor, against such institutions,
would have prevented my availing myself of theth for his
benefit. He had requested, at the commencement of the
attack—and his wife had every disposition to indulge his
request—to be allowed to die. if such was to be its issue,
in his own home—poor fellow, his home ? I had, there-
fore, only to do my best with the means at my disposal,
and they were little. My prescription was at once writ-
ten and despatched to the Dispensary, whilst I remained
to give some directions about his diet and general treat-
ment.

The family of the poor man, I have said, consisted of
his wife and two daughters, whose ages might be respec-
tively 15 and 17 years. The former, whilst I was engaged
in examining the symptoms of the sufferer, sate upon the
edge of the crazy bedstead ; now looking uneasily in his
face, and then fixing her eyes upon my own, as if she
sought by her basilisk look to drag from me my most hid•
den thoughts. His gaze would insensibly diminish in in-
tenseness and then suddenly brighten afresh, like the
shooting of an expiring lamp. Again it would grow dim
and dull, as if her evidently enfeebled mental and corpo-
real powers were unequal to any continuous effort ; and,
in a while, she would resume the swaying motion of
body and dirgelike moaning, peculiar to the lamentations
of the Irish, which she had probably caught from con-
tinual association with the natives of that country, who
form the principal portion of the population amongst
which she was living. The two girls sate aloof upon the
floor, leaning over the few embers in the worn-out grate,
and maintaining a stupid indifference to what was passing
around them.

I had subsequent opportunities of noticing minutely
the dispositions and habits of this wretched farni y
and, at the same time, of learning some little of the r
past history ; and certainly a more striking examile
of the depressing and demoralising influence upon the
human character, produced by bad sanatory regulations
and constant exposure to the contaminations, both moral
and physical, which abound in the densely-populated and
filthy streets and courts of our large towns, never presented
itself to my observation. The wife and mother—of the
patient himself I shall have to speak when describing the
medical features of his case—was still, although a wreck,
far from unpleasing in her general appearance and features.
In early life she must have possessed that kind of robust
beauty, which is the characteristic of the middle farmer
class of onr northern and midland counties, and she
still had in her manner something which placed her above
the squalid-looking and slovenly beings, amongst whom
she was located, and from whom perhaps she had con-
tracted habits very foreign to her early training and cha-
racter. Her mental powers, I have said, bore the ap-
pearance of having been enfeebled. Trouble had doubt-
less done much ; but, alas ! the use of intoxicating stimu-
lants had done more. And let it not be set down as an
unpardonable crime in the poor woman that, such as her
lot had been, she had resorted to this means of dissipat-
ing memory and recruiting her failing or flagging corporeal
powers. The recording angel will assuredly erase many
an accusatory line from his many-paged volume, in the
case of one so situated, whilst he will retain, in all its
damning strength, the crime—it is a harsh word, but I
cannot withdraw it—of those, whose selfishness and
avarice produce in their fellow beings such sad results.
Twelve years before this period of her history she had
been, although in her worldly circumstances unfortunate,
still an industrious, sober, and stiring wife and mother.
Now she was a drunkard—a confirmed one almost. Her
life was an alternation of sorrow and self-reproach for her
failing, and inebriety, in which all feeling was' drowned.
Yet still, in all her moods of mind, she loved, with a first
fond love, the sufferer in that desolate hovel—the husband
of her early affection ; and, to his credit it will be re-
corded that he bore with her, whilst he grieved over her ;
although perhaps; to his unawakened intellect, any con-
ception of the full weight of misery, which continually
drove her to renewed lapses from propriety and tem-
perance, never presented itself. As she sate by him now
in his illness, devoting herself to the duty of providing
for him the little relief in her power, an experienced eye
could detect the existence of the worm, which was tortur-
ing her almost to the verge of delirium. What is so
'awful to human nature as the consciousness of its fall?
Yet this woman was weighed down under that conscious-
ness. She dared not look in the face of the suffering

partner of her trials, whose fevered and restless eyes she I
thought reproached her for her many offences. She dared
-not rebuke the sullen behaviour of those two heartless
`daughters, before whom she knew that she had stood so
often committed and degraded. There was a restlessness I
in her every motion—a kind of 'spasmodic eagerness to
escape from reflection ; and, alas, when she could avail her-
self
of any little opportunity—any pretence whatever to
escape from the eyes, which she thought were watching
her very soul, and mocking at its weakness—she would
snatch at it to procure the temporary solace of renewed
excitement, and to pour fresh oil upon the fire, which was
consuming and degrading her.
Whence arise such sad phases in the human character?
The cold-hearted philosopher, who assumes and preaches
"to us that reason is supreme as our guide upon earth, will
tell us that they spring from faulty education. The
Christian minister, more sincere, will tell us that they
spring from the want of vital Religion. The medical
man however has his tale to tell ; and it is a startling one.
He argues from his own practice and his knowledge of the
principles and conformation of the human frame—that
complicated machine, acted upon by so many sympathies
both from within and without. He finds that when he
meets with certain states of that machine—depression of
the corporeal and mental powers, hypocondria, low ner-
vous fever, &c.,—he is compelled to resort to the use of
stimulants. When you plunge, therefore, a large portion
of your population into unhealthy hovels, and unventi-
lated streets, and subject them to the influences of a
vitiated atmosphere, with no adequate supply of water for
the purposes of cleanliness, and scarcely light itself, you
induce that very depression of spirits and of the body, as
a remedy for which the unfortunate victims of your neg-
lect resort to the dram-shop, as the medical man does to
the stimulating articles of the pharmacopeia. The latter,
however, when the symptoms which call for such treat-
ment have passed away with their immediate cause, allows
nature to resume her sway ; but, with the former, the
depressing causes--the vitiated atmosphere, &c.,—are
never removed. The influence of the dram over—the
the temporary effort of stimulation exhausted—there is
no natural state to fall back upon. The stimulant is
therefore again demanded ; becomes a necessity, a habit,
and ultimately a vice, growing upon those using it until
at last it debases and destroys them. Education—mere
mental training—can do nothing, or nearly nothing, here.
Religion itself ton often strives in vain to overcome the
opposing power of bodily or mental illness, combined
with influences such as those with which our town poor
are surrounded.

(To be concluded next week)