Unorthodoxy in Medicine and Religion *Presidential Address to the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society, 10th October 1962.

The eighteenth century was the age of enlightenment. In that partofitwhich concerns us this evening between 1740 and 1780, we find a generation of men self-poised, self-approved, freed from the disturbing passions of the past and not yet troubled by the different world which would soon be upon them as a result of the Industrial and the French Revolutions. It was a moment of peace between the religious fana-ticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race which were to follow. It was in the words of Trevelyan the age of aristocracy and liberty; of the rule of law and the absence of reform; the age of unchallenged assumptions when philosophers had ample leisure to moralise on the human scene, in the happy belief that the present state of society was permanent. It was the classical age, the final outcome of reason and experience: it regarded itself not as setting out but as having arrived. The medieval period had sunk below the horizon and men looked back with a sense of kinship to the ancient world. The upper classes regarded the Greeks and Romans as honorary Englishmen, their precursors in liberty and culture, and the Roman Senate as the prototype of the British Parliament. It was the best of all ages to live in if you had influence and wealth. But for the less privileged, the labourer, the Kingswood miner and the peasant poor it was far from being Merrie England. For them it was an age of ignorance and brutality; of dirt and squalor, of disease-ridden prisons, of overcrowding in small insanitary dwellings, of open sewers and uncontrolled epidemics, of a death rate which would appal us today. J. H. Plumb writes in "England in the XVIII Century": "The first noticeable thing about Bristol would have been the stench. There was no sanitary system and the poor made a public convenience of every nook and cranny. The unpaved streets were narrow: many of the Bristol streets were too narrow for carts, and sledges had to be used for moving goods. Most cellars were inhabited not only by people but also their pigs, fowls, sometimes even by their horses and cattle. All tradesmen and craftsmen used the street as their dustbin, including butchers who threw out the refuse of their shambles to decay and moulder in the streets". Hospitals were a poor remedy for the sick poor and …