Cantlie’s Crisis Revisited

Cantlie opened Physical Efficiency plainly, defining “physical efficiency” as both the physical and mental “fitness of men and women for their life’s work.” Regardless of what type of work an individual did in their lifetime, Cantlie asserted that “the maintenance of the physical powers of the individual” was a “national asset.” Cantlie continued by arguing that “Governments come and go . . . but the soundness of the people physically and morally is the essence of national being.”4Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 1–2. Cantlie then went on to explain several causes for declining physical fitness in Great Britain. First among these, he believed, was the unsanitary ecology of many British cities – echoing the concerns of the local Medical Officers of Health. Cantlie believed that high rents too often confined families to overcrowded living environments “in which immorality prevails, and degeneracy in mind and body necessarily ensues.”5Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 12. He also expressed concerns about infant mortality: he quite pessimistically believed that too many parents neglected their “natural and primary duties to their tender offspring,” resulting in either high infant mortality rates, or, in those who lived past one year of age, an unhealthy development of many British children.6Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 13.

On the other hand, Cantlie also offered several suggestions as to how to improve the public health in large English cities as he sought to bring national attention to the dangers of the urban penalty. Let us take as an example Cantlie’s call for English dietary reform. According to Cantlie, milk, “the staple food of all young people, has become a luxury amongst the children of the agricultural labourer, and tea has taken its place.”7Cantlie, “Are We Degenerating?” Cantlie found this shocking. Bread and tea did not have nearly the equivalent nutritional value to the developing child as milk, the absence of which was an invitation for disease. In a strong condemnation of the late nineteenth-­century trend toward refrigeration and the movement of foodstuffs worldwide on steamships and railways, Cantlie believed that children should be fed locally grown food, whenever possible.8Freidberg, Fresh, 9, suggests that a shift in sources of food that resulted from greater means of refrigeration “pushed the frontiers of fresh food across continents.” Cantlie believed that “no foreign food can equal our home-grown products, whether in cereals or meat, as regards quality. An inferior quality means inferiority in nourishing power, and, though inferior food may satisfy our hunger, it has a direct bearing upon our frames, our temperament, our ‘mettle.’”9Cantlie, “Are We Degenerating?” Cantlie also proposed a relationship between the rise in “physical deterioration” and an increase in imported canned, tinned, and frozen food from continental European or American slaughterhouses since the 1870s. He feared that “British prowess cannot be maintained on the dumped refuse of the Chicago slaughter-houses canned for British consumption.”10Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 112. Note that many of these ideas for dietary reform were already being undertaken locally by the Medical Officers of Health.11Freidberg, Fresh, 7, reminds us, though, that economic privilege provided families with access to fresher food. Much of what Cantlie, and the Medical Officers of Health, argued about dietary reform reflects their middle-class status and economic privilege.

In addition to dietary reforms, Cantlie emphasized the importance of physical fitness. He encouraged efforts that would break up the “monotony” of exercise and thought that parks and schools would be ideal sites for physical activity. He argued that “large, covered playgrounds, warmed and rendered attractive, should be made in the centre of our cities” and “plentiful enough to be within a reasonable distance, say half a mile, of every household.”12Cantlie, “The Health of the People,” 11. He felt that drill and physical education in schools (a subject which we will return to in the next chapter) could serve the dual purpose of preventing “hooliganism” and improving health and fitness. Thus, Cantlie proposed that schools should promote outdoor games and sports, until such a time that compulsory military training could become a part of the normal life of the average Briton. For physical education to serve its purpose, though, Cantlie believed that schools must be surrounded by fresh air, or else these outdoor games and sports would be counterproductive.13Cantlie, “The Health of the People,” 11–20. Cantlie further believed that a “couple years’ military training, say from [ages] seventeen to nineteen,” would be “a great hygienic gain to the nation.” This military service would teach the importance of discipline and hygiene and would instill in teenage Britons the importance of physical fitness, which in turn would be a huge benefit to their “work-producing power.”14Cantlie, “The Health of the People,” 20.

Cantlie’s concerns that followed from the South African War make for an interesting case study. He was a physician who was deeply troubled by the dangers of city life, and who firmly believed in the importance of public health reform. In the wake of the South African War his arguments no longer seemed like a cynical voice in the void, in contrast to the response to his earlier 1885 lecture on the “Degeneration Amongst Londoners.” Cantlie’s new writings were much more positively received, when considered in light of the data emerging from the medical examinations of volunteers rejected for military service during the Second Anglo-Boer War. His peers were much more receptive at last to Cantlie’s concern “that every class of the population, from Royalty to the most humbly born, is called upon to play a part – an important part – in the maintenance of the welfare of the Empire.”15Cantlie, “The Health of the People,” 4. To perform these duties to the Empire, Englishmen from the “humbly born” on up through the ranks of society all had to be physically capable and healthy enough to do so.

The editors of The Lancet wrote an April 1904 editorial that offered an assent to Cantlie’s crisis. They reported that it must “be accepted as a fact [that] the rapidly increasing tendency to forsake the country for the town must be making for deterioration rather than improvement.”16“The Education Act and Physical Fitness,” 1003. The medical data emerging from the South African War provided quantitative proof of these concerns. In turn, the apparent fact that a large minority of the British population was too physically unfit to protect the future of the Empire necessitated a larger, national response. Parliament had to react. The question remained, though, what the appropriate response should entail.