“Gardee loo!”came a shrill voice from one of the upper windows in a dark alleyway in Edinburgh’s Old Town. With little time given to step aside, the pedestrian sought to avoid the effluence hurled from above, and with an angry shout, he sought to clean his trousers of faeces and other nasties that had splattered on him. Welcome to old Edinburgh! Much of the stench in the city, which gave it the unenviable name of Auld Reikie, came from the thick smoke from the abundant chimneys; but this other stench was stomach-wrenching and disease-ridden, a breeding-ground for plagues. According to Professor MacLennan of the Royal Infirmary, eleven plagues stalked the crowded apartments and houses in the Old Town, between 1349 and 1645, leaving a death toll of between 20% and almost 50% of the population at various times. However, it was not just these plagues, but the epidemics of cholera, smallpox, typhoid and diphtheria, which destroyed the lives of multitudes later in the 19th century.
Back in 1761 Revd John Wesley the revivalist could cry, “How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it, stink worse than a common sewer? Will no lover of this country, or of decency and common sense, find a remedy for it?” Wesley’s cry would be answered in 1865 through a fellow Christian, Sir Henry Littlejohn (1828-1914), an elder at St Giles’. Three years earlier he had been appointed as the first Municipal Medical Officer in Scotland. With precise research he mapped out the city, painstakingly collecting accurate statistics about the sanitary conditions, and presenting the evidence and solutions for a new sanitary system to the leaders of the nation with a shrewd confidence. In his 120-page Report he had analysed the social and sanitary conditions of over 1,000 streets, closes and tenements. His careful data had demonstrated that disease spread most virulently in the crowded hovels of poverty.
Readily assisting him were the missionaries, especially from Edinburgh City Mission (ECM), who were the social workers of that period. Bailie Pollard, being one of the directors of ECM, became the natural bridge between the missionaries and the town council later in 1896, with the development of the revolutionary and new underground sanitation system, as he was appointed Chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Town Council. This was legally enacted the following year as part of the Public Health Act (Scotland).
Henry Littlejohn’s Report of the Sanitary Condition of the City of Edinburgh (1865), was shocking and revealing, but it led to a transformation of our sanitary conditions in Edinburgh and Scotland, with doctors being required to report cases of early disease on their districts, and the establishment of Fever Hospitals to quarantine and care for the infected people. Besides this, the town council, on the advice of Littlejohn, implemented a revolutionary programme of urban regeneration. This included not only an underground sewage system, but a cleaner, more efficient water supply, food hygiene regulations, waste disposal, legal building standards and the demolition of many houses which were deemed to be in the worst slums. These were replaced with Victorian houses for the poor, specifically designed on wider streets.
Sir Henry Littlejohn’s work became a model to many other cities in the world to copy, thereby saving the lives of millions, and he was frequently requested to advise the British government on issues of public health. Besides this vital work, he was the first person to correctly link cigarette smoking with lung cancer, 62 years before the Royal College of Surgeons issued their report. He was also the co-pioneer of forensic science, with another Edinburgh Christian, Sir Joseph Bell.
“Heal the sick…” (Matthew 10:8, NKJV).
Image: Sir Henry Littlejohn (1828-1914): [1], CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons