From The British Medical Journal, 23 December, 2000:
“They [left the busy scene, and] went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slip-shod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.”1
With these words Charles Dickens describes Scrooge's journey with the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come into the poorest streets of London to view the body of Tiny Tim, the child his miserliness will kill if it continues unchecked. Dickens's A Christmas Carol also helped open the eyes of non-fictitious Londoners to the extent of poverty in their city at a time when social views were rapidly changing. Charles Booth was a contemporary chronicler of fact rather than fiction; together with his researchers he surveyed these same streets so that we can see today where the Tiny Tims of the past lived. Using Booth's map of poverty at the end of the 19th century we test the hypothesis of the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come: that miserliness in the past and present leads to future inequalities in health....
....MUCH MORE
And some of the Christmas, 2022 offerings:
- Direct Uptake of Nutrition and Caffeine Study (DUNCS): biscuit based comparative study
- The gift that won’t keep on giving: ban coal as punishment at Christmas
- A Christmas themed physical activity intervention to increase participation in physical activity during Advent: pilot randomised controlled trial
And more tomorrow.
Yesterday:A British Medical Journal Christmas
