The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tions which were brought to Europe after the disco¬ very of new worlds. There is nothing more notorious than that the same increase of international communication, which has yielded to mankind increase of resources, has also intro¬ duced increase of disease. To multiply proofs by going to the resources of literature, wherever letters are not extinct, would be to weary you to no useful purpose. No history,—no poetry,—no national code, —no religion, exists without some allusion to the danger of vast multitudes. We are not ignorant how unpopular, how repulsive, and peculiarly at this period how threadbare and exhausted, must any subject be appertaining to public health, or glancing at public pestilence. No nation has a greater disgust to such considerations than the British people. During the calamity, indeed, their social system supplies ample means for relieving exigencies ; but, even when the danger of approach is most imminent, they hesitate to converse, and much less to read, upon it. The danger once over, they have a sullen pleasure in bury¬ ing and forgetting its horrors; and, unlike other nations, their public thanksgiving once recorded, they consider the wrhole subject as a sealed book, which no poet, no painter, no architect, must presume to com¬ memorate, and with regard to which the less said by the annalist the better. Your nobility and your statesmen are not exempt from the same national peculiarity. Infinitely inferior, as all your social arrangements are for public health to those of ancient Home, yet many of your legislators churlishly think that too much has