Publisher's Synopsis
Thomas Southwood Smith (1788-1851) was an English physician and sanitary reformer. He entered the University of Edinburgh in October 1812, his first wife, Anne, with whom he had two daughters, having died that year. In June 1813 he began a course of fortnightly evening lectures on universal restoration which were published in 1816, earning him a literary reputation. He took his MD degree in 1816 and began practice in Yeovil, Somerset, then in 1820 moved to London. In 1824 Smith was appointed physician to the London Fever Hospital and began to write papers on public health. His post gave him the opportunity to study diseases of poverty and in the late 1830s he was one of the first doctors brought in to report to the Poor Law Commission. In 1842 he was one of the founders of an early housing association, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, and from 1848-54 worked closely with Edwin Chadwick at the Central Board of Health. His reports on quarantine, cholera and yellow fever, and on the results of sanitary improvement, were of international importance, and his earlier work A Treatise on Fever (1830) became a standard authority on the subject. He had a son by his second wife Mary from whom he had separated by the late 1830s, living for the rest of his life with the artist Margaret Gillies.This illustrated retrospective written by his granddaughter Gertrude was published in 1898.
