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Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. 1841. Half title, vi,56p. Rebound in blue cloth. Not in Goldsmiths' or Kress. Black 5309. * In taking on Chalmers, Alison was challenging the foremost authority on poverty in Scotland. For well over twenty years Chalmers had championed the voluntary system of poor relief and systematically and steadfastly opposed any introduction of compulsory legal provision on the English model. Throughout this pamphlet Alison answers points made in Chalmers's most recent work On the sufficiency of the parochial system, without a poor rate, for the right management of the poor. Alison believed that the two basic arguments put forward by Chalmers and his followers that a Poor Law for Scotland would (a) encourage unwanted population and hence increase poverty and (b) injure the moral character of the people were both wrong. He argues that on the contrary a properly run Poor-Law would lead to a decrease of redundant population and improve the moral conditions of the people. He argues that the present voluntary system of relief was quite inadequate to the problem and that the destitution of the poor of Scotland had a serious effect in fostering disease and increasing mortality amongst them.Elsewhere he quotes extensively from various sanitary surveys including those made by Duncan at Liverpool to show that poverty and diseases are worse in Scotland than in any other parts of England or Wales: to this the only solution was a properly managed legal provision.One of the great principles which underlay the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act had been that poverty was to some extent voluntary and could be deterred. In the next decade in the shift from a Poor Law to a Public Health perspective, attitudes, to some extent began to experience a sea-change. The problems of sanitation, housing, and water supply - the problems of large industrial towns - were to a real extent beyond the immediate responsibility of the individual. Alison, a medical man, played an outstanding role in this shift of emphasis. * William Pulteney Alison (1790-1859), physician, pupil of Dugald Stewart, who, at one time, it was thought he would succeed as professor at Edinburgh. In 1815 he began his medical career as physician to the newly-founded New Town Dispensary where he gained that knowledge of the sufferings of the poor which formed the inspiration of all his most important subsequent work. For thirty-six years Alison was the Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University and during this time was the unquestioned head of the medical profession in Scotland. Dr. Duncan of Liverpool, the first medical officer of Health for any town in Britain, was his friend and pupil. From the beginning of his medical experience among the poor, Alison had been made very aware of the connection between poverty and the spread of diseases. The epidemics of cholera in 1832-32 and the subsequent epidemics of fever, confirmed him in the belief of the momentous importance to national health of this question. In the years 1832-40 he thought he traced an increase in the prevalence and in the mortality of fevers, which was directly connected with the spread of pauperism, especially in great towns. To attack the disease it was necessary first, he thought, to attack the conditions favouring disease. He expressed these ideas in Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland, and its effects on the Health of the Great Towns, 1840. Thomas Chalmers had congratulated Scotland on escaping a system of Legal Provision for the Poor. Pulteney Alison on the other hand emphatically demanded an effective Poor Relief in Scotland as a first and indispensable step against the devastating fevers of the slums. In the selfish community which refused to pay its poor rates nature was avenging its neglected rights, by the spread of typhus fever and other contagious disorders, originating in the suffering classes but spreading well beyond them. The system of poor relief in Scotla. Seller Inventory # 24897
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