Smith TS
Smith, Thomas Southwood
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Public health
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 21 December 1788, at Martock, Somerset, England
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 10 December 1861, in Florence, Italy. Aged 72
DISCIPLINE: Physician and sanitary reformer
FIELD: Sanitation
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: ?
SIBLINGS: ?
SPOUSE: Miss Reade (d. 1813), married 1810; Miss Taylor, married 1818
CHILDREN: Two daughters by first marriage, Caroline and ?; son, Herman
(1820-97), by second marriage
EDUCATION: Bristol Baptist College
MAJOR WORK: 'Treatise on Fever', 1830
LIFE AND TIMES:
In the autumn of 1812 Smith enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh and became Unitarian minister at Skinner's Hall, Cannongate where his sermons began to attract congregations of around 200. In June 1813, Smith began a course of evening lectures on universalism, published in 1816 as 'The Illustrations of the Divine Government,' a blueprint for his work in social reform. The work was apparently much admired, most notably by the poets Byron*,Wordsworth* and George Crabbe.
In July 1813 Smith helped found the Scottish Unitarian Association, of which he became the first secretary, and in 1815 published an 'Appeal' on its behalf. He received his M.D. in August 1816, and later the same year moved to Yeovil in Somerset, England, where he had been appointed as minister to the Vicarage Street Chapel and also set himself up as a general practitioner.
After four years in Yeovil, he moved to Bethnal Green, London, where he gave up preaching and devoted himself to medical practice. In 1823 he helped found the 'Westminster Review', for the first number of which (January 1824) he wrote an article on Jeremy Bentham's* system of education.
In 1824 Smith was appointed as physician to the London Fever Hospital, and posts at the Eastern Dispensary and the Jews' Hospital followed. In 1830 Smith published the results of six years' dedicated investigative work at the Fever Hospital, entitled 'A Treatise on Fever', the central message of which was that epidemics thrive on the conditions brought about by poverty, and were therefore preventable.
In June 1832 Smith became almost notorious as the physician to carry out the instructions in Bentham's will to dissect his body and preserve his skeleton, which - dressed in Bentham's clothes with a waxen head - was at first displayed at Smith's consulting room at Finsbury Square before being transferred to University College, Gower Street, London, where it remains.
In the early 1830s Smith, now well-known as an expert on the link between disease and social conditions, became involved in government moves towards social reform. In 1832 the House of Commons set up a commission to provide evidence of working conditions in the manufacturing industries around Great Britain, and in particular those affecting children.
The large-scale growth of factories had been happening at least since the 1780s, but the social consequences of this aspect of industrialization had not been dealt with by government legislation. In order to collect reliable evidence the government elected three parliamentary commissioners, the economist Thomas Tooke, the reformer Chadwick*, and Smith to investigate working conditions in industrial areas. In 1833 the commission published its report and recommendations, and the Factory Act of that year embodied much of its work.
The Act made it illegal for children under the age of 9 to work in textile mills, and for those up to the age of 13 to work at night and for more than eight hours per day, while child employees were to be medically inspected and given a minimum of two hours schooling each working day.
In 1834, he published a summary and analysis of all the evidence submitted to the commission, and in particular examined the incidence and nature of industrial disease and injury, and pinpointed for the first time both respiratory problems in children working in the dust and floating filaments of the carding-rooms, and the high risk of accidents when fatigued children were operating unprotected machinery during long hours of monotonous toil in overheated and ill-ventilated mills.
Smith's work was influential in a variety of ways, not least on the work of his great friend
Dickens*, whose novels highlight the plight of the poor so affectingly, one of which ('Bleak House', 1852-53) includes a portrait of Smith himself as Allan Woodcourt the philanthropic surgeon.
Smith published: 'Report on the Physical Causes of Sickness and Mortality to which the Poor are particularly exposed', in 1838, and the following year became the main founder of the 'Health of Towns Association'.
Meanwhile, campaigns for reform in working conditions continued, and Smith again became involved, this time in reform in the mining industry. The 1840 reports, made by twenty sub-commissioners to Smith and his colleagues, were quite horrifying, with children as young as six or seven employed underground in opening and shutting ventilation doors in dark and damp conditions, and others slightly older pulling coal carriages for 10 to 12 hours per day.
The employment of children in the mines resulted in fatigue, extraordinary muscular development, stunted growth and crippled gait, skin disorders and other 'positive diseases.' In 1842 Smith helped to found the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes', which in the late 1840s supervised the building of the first model houses in London designed to exclude epidemics by providing sanitary conditions.
During his later years Smith continued his reports on disease and sanitation - on quarantine (1845), cholera (1850) and yellow fever (1852) - and on the results of sanitary improvement (1854), works which were published all over Europe.
In 1847 he was made a member of the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, and on his retirement from medical practice in 1850 was appointed a permanent member of the Board of Health. In the late 1850s he suffered a serious illness, and in October 1861 went to visit his younger daughter in Florence, where in December he died from an attack of
bronchitis. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Florence, where there is a monument to his memory.
ASSESSMENT: Known for his expertise in the links between disease and poverty, who was highly influential in the moves in the mid-19th towards social reform.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: TS Smith, early public health pioneer
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
DNB
Guy, Dr. John R., Compassion and the art of the possible: Dr Southwood Smith as social reformer and public health pioneer, Wisbech: Octavia Hill Society, 1996