A Visit to Eastbourne, Beachy Head, and the South Downs

The East Sussex city of Eastbourne is a marvelous place to enjoy the seaside and the nearby South Downs and chalk cliffs. My wife and I spent a couple of days there recently. The weather was a bit cool, but the spectacular scenery made up for it. The partly cloudy skies produced an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic blue-green patchwork on the sea. 

Eastbourne is an old settlement, going back to Anglo-Saxon times at least, but it was only a village until the 19^th century. It began to expand after 1800 when Georges III and IV made sea-bathing popular for health and recreational reasons.  It boomed after the railway line arrived there in the 1840s, allowing tourists to get within easy walking distance of the beaches. The train is still a pleasant and swift way to get there, taking little more than an hour from London. Today, the population is expanding again, and is currently about 100,000.

The heyday of Eastbourne was the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and the town retains a distinct Victorian look. That includes Eastbourne Pier, an attractive place to promenade, which has been nicely restored after a devastating fire in July 2014.

 

The Grand Hotel, built in 1875, is another Victorian gem. When opened it had about 200 rooms, but only five bathrooms. Chamber pots were of course provided, and staff emptied them daily. Some aspects of Victorian life were lacking in charm.  Today all the rooms have loos, but there are fewer rooms, only about 150. They had to put the bathrooms somewhere, I guess. Between 1924 and 1939 the BBC orchestra performed in the Grand Hotel Ballroom on Saturday nights. World War II and the Blitz ended that. Much of the population was evacuated because the town was an easy target for German bombers. Today, the Grand has returned to its old glory, and is a 5-star hotel.

One of the best ways to enjoy the charms of the Eastbourne area is to walk along the “boardwalk” to the west, then up the hill to Beachy Head, the highest and last chalk cliff jutting from the South Downs.

 

At its peak, Beachy Head is 561 feet above the sea. The views of the town, the sea, the cliffs, and the Downs from here are delightful.

There is also the scenic Beachy Head Lighthouse, of which I took many photos. Too many! 

From Beachy Head, the South Downs Way winds along the cliffs known as the Seven Sisters. Along the way you can see the first lighthouse built here in the early 19th century, Belle Tout Light. It was not a great success due to fog often enveloping the cliff tops. The Beachy Head Light replaced it in 1902. Bell Tout is now a private guesthouse. In 1999, it was moved back 56 feet after a large section of cliff fell into the sea.

  

If you cannot walk all this way (several miles in one direction and sometimes steep), you can take an Eastbourne tour bus that starts at the Pier and winds along the cliffs and the Downs before circling back to town. The tour takes about 45 minutes if you don’t get off anywhere. It is a hop-on hop-off tour, so you can get off, walk about, and then get on the next bus, which comes along every 30 minutes. If you are a bit peckish or in need of liquid refreshment, two attractive pubs and a café are located at bus stops. We had lunch at the charming Tiger Inn in the village of East Dean.

We enjoyed our trip to Eastbourne and are planning to return soon, hopefully when the weather will be a bit warmer!

Man Rescued From Manure Pile Returns, Praising Trump and God

A man was rescued yesterday from a manure barge in Illinois. Two teenage
girls biking along the shore spotted his head sticking out of the fragrant cargo. They called out to him, asking if he wished to be rescued. “Hell no!” he replied, “I belong here." Refusing to believe what they had heard, the girls called 911. The local rescue squad intercepted the barge at the next lock.

The man, known only as Clyde at present, resisted his rescuers’ attempts to extricate him from the muck, shouting “Leave me here! God and President Trump chose me for this position.” Despite his resistance, the rescue squad succeeded in pulling him out, accompanied by a large sucking sound. Far from being thankful for his release, the fragrant man continued to protest as he was taken away for a shower and a change of clothes.

Asked how he ended up in such an unusual place, Clyde replied in his homey style. “I'd drunk a couple bottles of Thunderburst and next thing I knows I’m riding down this river, watchin' the scenery go by. How I got here, well I warn't sure at first. Then I recalled what my wife said to me the night before. ‘Get out!’ she said. 'The Lord ain’t through with you yet.’ I realized that God had put me here, through the actions of his blessed instrument, President Trump. We mebbe not understand it all, but the president, he knows what’s best for us. He's gonna make us great again, and we must do whatever he says. It's Godswill.”

Asked if he believed that God had also intended his rescue, he replied, “No, this is Satan’s work. I must go where Trump and God want me!” At that, he ran and jumped back on to the barge with a large plop. Source: ANN (Alternative News Network)   

Bedlam! London's Bethlem Hospital and the Word it gave us.

In our language today, "bedlam" usually means a scene of mad and noisy confusion. It was once a common or generic term for a madhouse. The word "bedlam" derives from an institution with a very long history, London's Bethlem Hospital. It was originally a medieval monastic foundation, the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, founded in 1247 to care for sick paupers. By the 15th century at the latest, it was specializing in the care of "mad" people and the name had become corrupted to Bethlem, or Bedlam. 

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530's, he gave Bethlem to London, and it became a public hospital. By the 17th century, the original building had become inadequate and the city replaced it with a new structure at Moorfields, just outside the walls. The image below is of this second Bedlam, opened in 1676.

During the 18th century, Bedlam became a popular attraction. People could visit on certain days, to see the "lunatics." Some histories claim that the public came to stare at and cruelly taunt the patients. Others argue that the public openness brought in money and helped prevent mistreatment. 

In the 1730's, William Hogarth famously depicted a scene in Bedlam in his didactic series, "The Rake's Progress." The rake, who has gone mad as a result of debauchery and debt, is shown at the center, naked, raving, with his head shaved. He is surrounded by stock caricatures of lunatics, including religious maniacs, megalomaniacs, melancholics, and would be popes and kings.

Public visits were banned in the late 18th century. In the following decades, the building deteriorated badly, and a parliamentary investigation in 1814-15 revealed scandalous conditions. Patients were often filthy and ragged, sometimes beaten and chained up. One patient, James Norris, an American sailor who had been chained to a wall in a metal harness for years, became an icon of a reform movement that was gathering pace by the early 19th century.

The movement was inspired by advocates of what became known as "moral treatment, or "moral therapy." One of the most effective spokesmen for moral treatment was a French doctor, Philippe Pinel, who has been immortalized in a famous, if romanticized, painting. 
It shows Pinel ordering the chains removed from women patients at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris in the early 1790's. Pinel's methods became widely known after he published his Treatise on Insanity in 1806. 

Another important inspiration for "lunacy reformers" came from an English institution, the Retreat, near York. The Retreat, opened in 1796, was the idea of a Quaker tea merchant, William Tuke, disturbed by mistreatment of patients at the nearby York Asylum. The Retreat adopted the principles of moral treatment and soon became world famous, especially after Tuke's grandson Samuel published A Description of the Retreat in 1813. Below is an early image of The Retreat.

Moral treatment was essentially a psychological therapy. The idea was that the mad retained a modicum of reason and human instincts and could best be managed -- and often cured -- by appealing to their feelings or emotions and their desire for acceptance. 

Promoters of moral therapy downplayed the use of medical therapies, which often involved bleeding and harsh purgatives. They denounced physical punishments, chains and low diet for "maniacs," which often bordered on starvation. Kind treatment, they argued, was more effective in "managing" patients. 

At the Retreat, the patients were informed that they were part of a family, and the routines were designed to imitate family life as much as possible. Patients were encouraged to help in cleaning, gardening, and other work. 

Moral therapists did not abandon all means of coercion and control. A controlled order was essential to the system. Moral therapy sometimes involved the revoking of privileges, isolation, and mechanical restraint for unacceptable behavior. And above all, the patients were institutionalized, sometimes for many years.

The reformers who investigated Bethlem Hospital in 1815 were aware of the work of Pinel, the Tukes, and other examples of moral treatment. Their reports to Parliament led to the building of a new hospital south of the Thames at St. George's Fields. (below, c.1820) 

  
The new Bethlem gradually adopted many of the principles of moral treatment, or tried to. The same was true of the hundreds of public lunatic asylums (later renamed mental hospitals) established during the Victorian era. The system worked reasonably well in small institutions with adequate staff. Some asylums claimed to cure a high percentage of patients, as high as 90 percent. The claims were undoubtedly inflated, but in some cases, at least, the asylums functioned as refuges or retreats for the suffering.  

But the institutions grew ever larger in the late 19th century, holding hundreds, even thousands of patients, many of them with chronic conditions the institutions could do little for. Costs soared. Those responsible for funding sought economies of scale that inevitably undermined the methods of moral treatment. 

The following image, of Bethlem's men's gallery in the 1860's, illustrates the problem. It is clean, orderly, and bright. But the seemingly endless gallery, the barred windows, and the patients wandering about indicate that all is not well.

Conditions were often much worse elsewhere. Huge, underfunded asylums, despite the best efforts of many doctors and nurses, became warehouses where moral treatment became routine if applied at all. Individuals became lost in the mass. Many remained in the asylums for years, often for life. Scandals became common, with overuse of mechanical restraints, poor diet and sanitation, endless boredom, and sometimes abuse of patients.

In the late 20th century, most of the old asylums/mental hospitals closed down or were converted into acute, short stay institutions. Deinstitutionalization was encouraged by the development of new psychotic drugs, evidence of abuse of patients, and a desire to save money.

Advocates of deinstitutionalization, like those who promoted asylums, were hailed as reformers. Patients, they argued, could be better treated in the community, in a more natural setting than an institution. The results of "community care" have been mixed at best, often bedeviled by inadequate funding  A new crop of reformers now advocate a renewed attempt at creating therapeutic communities within hospitals.

Bethlem Hospital continues to treat and care for mentally ill and emotionally disturbed patients. It relocated to its current location near Beckenham, on the outer fringes of southeast London, in 1930.

And what of the old building at St. George's Fields? The wings were knocked down but the central part of the building remains. It has housed the Imperial War Museum since 1936. Appropriate, perhaps.

    

   


  
  

"We Have Conquered Infectious Disease!" Not.

“We have conquered infectious disease!” This may sound like Donald Trump, but it wasn't. It was a Surgeon-General of the United States, Luther Terry, in 1964.

No one would make that claim today, except Trump and supporters in the case of coronavirus. Even if we discount the current pandemic of Covid-19, infectious disease is one of the greatest causes of death in the world, accounting for about 25% of deaths worldwide and over 60% of deaths among children. 

But in 1964 the Surgeon-General's claim did not seem far fetched. Mortality from infectious disease had dropped sharply during the previous decades, at least in wealthy countries, and life expectancy had risen steeply, from about 50 to 75.

Many things contributed to the drop in deaths from infectious disease: better nutrition, clothing, and housing, improved sanitation and water supplies, vaccines, and antibiotics. Unfortunately, the drop was not uniform throughout the world:  poorer nations did not see the huge gains in life-span that richer ones did.

But even in the richer nations, the claimed “conquest of infectious disease” began to look like wishful thinking by the late 1970s and 1980s. New or newly recognized infectious diseases appeared, like AIDS, Legionnaires’ Disease, and Ebola, and old ones began to re-emerge, like TB, whooping cough, yellow fever, measles, and diphtheria. 

New, more deadly strains of malaria, cholera, TB, and dengue fever emerged. Many of the new strains of bacterial disease were and are resistant to antibiotics, partly as a result of overuse and incorrect use of these lifesavers. Others were viral, for which antibiotics are useless.

Many of the deaths from infectious disease today, especially among infants and children, are the result of poor sanitation and water supplies. Ironically, we have known how to prevent these deaths for more than a century. It is lack of resources and will, not lack of knowledge, that is the problem.

But it is not always lack of money that produces poor results in terms of controlling infectious disease. The US, which spends far more than any other country on health care, lags well behind many other countries in terms of health care outcomes. The problem is that too many people cannot afford adequate medical care because they cannot pay the high premiums for private health insurance, or cannot get it at all.

Ironically, another US Surgeon-General, Rupert Blue of South Carolina, proposed a national health insurance system in 1911, a universal plan that would cover everyone. “Public health is a public utility,” he said. “We are our brother’s keeper.”

Perhaps Blue didn’t choose the best audience to deliver the message. He spoke to a convention of insurance executives. They made sure Blue's idea didn't become reality. A century later, the US remains the only developed country in the world without a system of national health insurance. Perhaps Blue was just a century or so ahead of his time -- in the case of the USA, that is.

Changing that by itself would not conquer infectious disease, but it would help combat it, especially if combined with an effective program of preventive medicine, which the USA also lacks. It would also go far to reduce anxiety about the costs of medical care in the minds of many millions of Americans. 

A VERY Short History of Medicine

Fathers of Medicine and Allied Arts

Hippocrates & Co. 

Therapeutics

“Doctor, I have an earache.”

2000 BC – “Here, eat this root.”

1000 BC – “That root is heathen, say this 

prayer.”

1850 AD ­– “That prayer is superstition, drink 

this potion.”

1940 AD – “That potion is snake oil, swallow 

this pill.”

1985 AD – “That pill is ineffective, take this 

antibiotic.”

2000 AD – “That antibiotic is artificial. Here, 

eat this root.”

Quackery

Domestic Medicine

Medical Education

Robert Koch Establishes Germ Theory; Sells Chocolate

The Triumph of American Medicine

The New Moral World: Robert Owen's New Lanark

New Lanark, Scotland, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site about 25 miles from Glasgow on the Falls of Clyde. David Dale founded New Lanark as a textile mill village in 1785, taking advantage of the water power the falls provided. It became famous as a model factory town in the early 19th century after Dale's son in law, Welshman Robert Owen, took it over.

Contrary to the ideas of many factory owners of the early industrial era, Owen was convinced that he could treat his workers humanely and still make a profit. Besides offering better wages and shorter hours than most mills, he provided the workers and their families with decent housing and opportunities for education and self-improvement. He established the first infants' school in the UK in 1817, to take care of and educate young children while their parents worked. 

New Lanark flourished. Owen made a lot of money, and the town became well known, attracting the rich and famous from all over the European world. At its height, it was home to 2500 people. Owen's success convinced him that he could replicate it elsewhere, and go further in the direction of what he called "The New Moral World."

Owen believed, in common with many Enlightenment thinkers, that environment shaped human character, and that the right environment would produce morally superior people, a "New Moral World." By the 1820s, he had decided that the right environment was a "cooperative" one, in which people worked together for the common good.

In effect, Owen had embraced what Karl Marx later called "utopian socialism." In 1825, Owen sold New Lanark and sailed to America, where he founded a cooperative community, New Harmony, in Indiana. Below are two images of Owen's concept of the community, with housing, workshops, schools, and factories.

The New Harmony experiment was largely a failure. The inhabitants, not Owen's employees, proved to be un-cooperative. Perhaps, too, Owen was seen as a tyrant, trying to direct people's lives too much. 

After a few years, Owen gave up on New Harmony and sailed back to Britain, though several of his children remained and carved out successful careers in America. Back in Britain, he tried to establish a union of all British workers, The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. Due in part to government persecution, it failed by 1834, and Owen began to promote a new movement to found producers and consumers co-operatives. The first successful co-op was founded in 1844, in Rochdale, Lancashire, by the Rochdale Pioneers. It soon became a model for countless others since.

New Lanark itself went into a gradual decline after Owen left. It continued producing textiles until 1968. After the mill closed, people moved away and the buildings began to deteriorate. In 1974 a trust was founded to save them, and they have been gradually restored. About 200 people live in the restored housing and thousands more visit the site every year, learning about Owen's "New Moral World."

The old mill is now a hotel and some of the housing is now used as a hostel.

The infants school has also been restored to what it looked like when Owen established it. (School and Mill Race)

Today, New Harmony, Indiana, is also a popular tourist destination and so, in some form, Owen's legacy lives on. 

Further Reading: JFC Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in England and America: The Quest for a New Moral World (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)

Tom Paine: The Patriot America Rejected

The triumph of Trump and his MAGA movement of faux patriots tells me it is time to look once again at the career of someone who was a true patriot and friend of mankind, who labored for human rights instead of against them: Thomas Paine.

Poor Tom Paine. Rejected by American Patriots he served so well for being too radical, nearly guillotined by French revolutionaries for being too conservative, he died poor and forgotten in an America he helped to create. Ironically, the country that reveres his memory most is the one he rebelled against: Great Britain.

Paine was born in Thetford, England January 29, 1737. He trained in the same trade as his Quaker father, as a maker of rope stays used on sailing ships (not corset stays as some detractors claimed). At various times he also worked as an excise officer and schoolteacher.

In 1768 he was appointed an excise officer in Lewes, in Sussex, a town with a strong republican tradition. He lived in the 15^th century Bull House.

Paine soon became involved in the town government of Lewes and often held forth on politics at the White Hart Inn, now Hotel. I stayed here on my trip to Lewes a few years ago.

During his years in Lewes, Paine became increasingly anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic, sentiments he took to America in the autumn of 1774. He emigrated at the suggestion by Benjamin Franklin, then representing colonial interests in Britain. Paine arrived in Philadelphia to find the thirteen colonies on the verge of revolt against British rule. He quickly became involved in politics, and surged to fame with the publication of his immensely popular pamphlet Common Sense in January 1776.

In Common Sense, Paine argued that independence was just that. He avoided the formal, scholarly political discourse of the day, writing in an easy to read, punchy style that rendered politics intelligible to the average reader. The work converted many ordinary Americans to the idea of independence.

At the end of 1776, Paine published a pamphlet series The American Crisis, designed to inspire sacrifice in the struggle for independence. It opens with some of the most famous words ever written: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Washington had it read aloud to his soldiers.

During the War for Independence, Paine served the revolutionary government in various capacities. It was a bumpy time for him, as he clashed with some of his fellow revolutionaries, accusing them, with some reason, of corruption.

Perhaps Paine’s most important contribution to the revolutionary cause was his mission to France in 1781, with John Laurens of South Carolina. The two men shared something besides their revolutionary fervor: they opposed slavery. Laurens was killed in one of the last battles of the war.

Paine and Laurens succeeded in gaining funds and a French commitment to send a fleet and army to America later that year. The arrival of the French during Washington’s Siege of Yorktown, Virginia played a crucial role in bringing about the surrender of British forces under Lord Cornwallis in October.

Peace talks began a few months after Yorktown, and a treaty recognizing American independence was finalized in 1783.

Paine returned to England in 1787 to pursue business projects. He soon became involved in the Revolution that began in France in 1789. In 1791, he wrote a long defense of the French Revolution, The Rights of Man. It sold over a million copies, to the horror of British conservatives. 

James Gillray's cartoon, below, attacks Paine as he tightens violently Britannia's corset, a reference to his supposed occupation as a corset staymaker.

A second volume of The Rights of Man, in 1792, argued for a comprehensive program of universal, free education and social security. The book helped inspire radical movements, as well as major government efforts to suppress them and the book's author.

Paine went to France to avoid arrest, and became involved in the radical phase of the revolution. He was elected to the National Convention. When Louis XVI was tried for treason in 1792, Paine, who opposed capital punishment, voted against execution. 

Paine's plea to spare the king, although unsuccessful, angered radical Jacobins who soon came to power and began the Reign of Terror. They arrested Paine. He spent ten months in prison and narrowly avoided being guillotined. After his release, he criticized President Washington and other American leaders for not helping him.

In the late 1790s, Paine supported Napoleon, but turned against him when his authoritarian aims became clear. At the invitation of President Jefferson, Paine returned to the United States by 1803. 

Paine's welcome was not warm, partly because of his scathing criticisms of Washington and other American leaders. His opposition to slavery also alienated many people. And another work he wrote in installments during these years, The Age of Reason, attacked Christianity. 

The Age of Reason sold well, but it outraged many people, especially in the new United States, where a great evangelical revival was underway. Paine died impoverished and nearly friendless in New York in 1809. Only six people came to his funeral. Two of them black freedmen. A widely reprinted obituary stated that he “did some good, but much harm.”

In 1819 William Cobbett, a British radical, took Paine’s remains back to England for a proper burial. (image)

The burial apparently never happened and the ultimate disposal of Paine’s remains is unknown. 

During the 19^th century, Paine and his works helped inspire progressive movements in Britain and America. He is remembered fondly in the town of Lewes, Sussex. There is even a Rights of Man pub. Drop in for a pint or two when in town and toast the memory of Tom Paine, a true friend to mankind.

Lewes, Sussex