Introduction

At the time when he wrote these words in 1885 Cantlie had already established a strong professional reputation for himself, principally for his work training the Volunteer Medical Staff to serve as members of an ambulance corps in military field hospitals.6“Volunteer Medical Staff Corps.” However, Cantlie’s alarmist concerns about the rapidly declining health and physical fitness of most town-­dwellers seemed overstated and hyperbolic to most of his professional peers in 1885. Few of these colleagues would share Cantlie’s fears of degeneration as a cause for widespread concern. More often, the term “degeneration” was employed outside of public health, principally by anthropologists, criminologists, and alienists within the emerging field of eugenics in discussing the problems of “social pathology.”7Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 9; Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 200. Their discourse focused on what the Poor Laws referred to as the casual poor, and took on an increasingly evolutionary language that posited “that individual beings, or successive generations, could become more primitive as time passed.”8Thorsheim, “Green Space and Class in Imperial London,” 31.

So, when Cantlie first introduced his idea that urban life was broadly contributing to nationwide unfitness, or, in his more alarmist language, “national degeneration,” his argument was largely ignored, or at least rebuffed. For example, one editorial in The Standard noted that while Londoners might experience restlessness due to the high pressures of city life, “when Mr. Cantlie tells us that all our troubles are owing to lack of active exercise, he must surely have overlooked the fact that the English are the race most addicted to active exercise of any people in the world . . . Mr. Cantlie must have ignored the extravagant extent to which the ‘games’ aspect of English school life is being carried.”9“Untitled,” The Standard, January 31, 1885. Another criticism appeared in The Observer, and argued that infectious diseases, not declining physical fitness, were still the greatest threat to public health in British cities. The editorial noted that “drain fever is still running its course, and a great many people are not quite free from an ever-present terror of the vibrio [cholera] which walks by night, of the bacillus which is ever seeking those in whom it may incubate.” In addition, the editorialist noted a steady rise in cases of myopia, as many Britons were “not exercising their eyes or . . . working in dimly lit offices and shops,” which threatened “to make London run rivalry with Berlin for the pre-eminence of being the shortest-sighted city in the world.”10“Untitled,” The Observer, February 1, 1885. For more on the history of myopia, see Otter, The Victorian Eye, 38–45. But neither the continued threat of fever or cholera nor the increase in myopia signaled to this critic the “national degeneration” that Cantlie so feared.

While Cantlie’s alarmist concerns were often dismissed, not everyone disagreed with him. In his 1889 book The Town Dweller: His Needs and Wants, London physician J. Milner Fothergill noted that physical degeneration had been “a matter of vulgar observation for generations” and that “town life is seen to have a malignant and sinister effect upon the physique.”11Fothergill, The Town Dweller, 4. Fothergill attributed a decline in the bodily health and physique of urban-dwelling Britons to changes in the British diet and laboring practices. He believed that “the substitution of tea and white bread [for brown bread and milk], even with the addition of some butter, for the old porridge and milk, and boiled bread and milk, has exercised an injurious influence upon the physique.”12Fothergill, The Town Dweller, 5. The “sorry substitute” of mass-produced white bread for hearty, stone-ground wheat bread would later be described as the “food of poverty” by nutritional scientists in the twentieth century. See Maxwell, “Diet of the Poor”; Drummond, “Food in Relation to Health in Great Britain,” 943. For an early study of British bread consumption see Collins, “The ‘Consumer Revolution’ and the Growth of Factory Foods,” 26–43. With regards to labor, Fothergill lamented that “the short hours of labour to-day was largely due to the physical incapacity of the workmen.”13Fothergill, The Town Dweller, 5.

Like Cantlie, Fothergill believed that poor nutrition and a lack of exercise – the factors that contributed to the decline in fitness in urban Britain – were a function of socio-economic status and the ecology of living conditions. The aristocracy, which had the financial capability to eat a more balanced diet and to take holidays in the country, away from poor-quality town air, was naturally healthier than the urban-dwelling working classes. Among the working classes, differing environmental conditions had a significant impact on their health and fitness: comparing a Lincolnshire farmer with a Lancashire miller, Fothergill noted that while both slept in “ill-ventilated” rooms and both ate similarly low-quality food, the farmer was much healthier. The miller spent his whole day in an ill-ventilated mill, Fothergill wrote, and thus “cannot store up oxygen at any period of the twenty-four hours. On the other hand, the farm labourer is for hours daily in the open air, and treading the soil.”14Fothergill, The Town Dweller, 28–29. Thus, their lived and working environments dramatically influenced their health, and working in an urban factory was clearly worse.

Reports in the British Medical Journal were similarly concerned about the adverse effects of urban life by the late 1880s. For example, in 1889, the journal anecdotally reported that “the physical deterioration of the urban population of Great Britain has frequently been declared and discussed, and not always admitted.” In the article, Royal Navy Admiral Sir Edmund Commerell reported that stokers from rural districts performed their duties with superior quality because their agricultural labors had kept them fit, while “the steadily increasing immigration into the towns is one of the great evils of the day.”15“The Degeneration of Town Populations,” 29.