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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 365.: SANITARY V. SANATORY THE TIMES, 7 APR., 1847, P. 3 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III

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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

365.: “SANITARY” V. “SANATORY” THE TIMES, 7 APR., 1847, P. 3 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III [1835]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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365.

“SANITARY” V. “SANATORY”

THE TIMES, 7 APR., 1847, P. 3

This letter to the editor is in response to “H.,” “ ‘Sanatory’ v. ‘Sanitary,’ ” The Times, 6 Apr., 1847, p. 3. (Another response, by “F.P.,” generally supporting Mill’s view, appears immediately under his.) Mill was probably unaware that “sanatory” (meaning curative, not as a synonym for “sanitary”) was used in Bentham’s Deontology (1834)—but in any case he always maintained that Bowring was the real author of that work. “Sanitary” had been used, to “H.”’s annoyance, by George William Frederick Howard (1802-64), Viscount Morpeth, in a speech on the Public Health Bill, discussed in a leader in The Times on 2 Apr. It had been used, of course, in the title of Chadwick’s “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain” (1842), the first use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. The letter is Mill’s second to The Times, his first having been written nearly twenty years earlier (No. 36). Headed as title, with the subhead, “To the Editor of The Times,” it is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A letter signed ‘Orthographicus’ in the Times of 7th April 1847 on the spelling of the word Sanitary”

(MacMinn, p. 68).

sir,—

Your correspondent “H.,” in your paper of Tuesday, must be under a strange delusion in supposing that “sanatory” is the authorized English spelling, and that “sanitary” is an improper orthography requiring to be “vigorously resisted at its very first appearance.” “Sanatory,” as a substitute for “sanitary,” is a piece of affected slipslop, only introduced within the last two or three years. All the good English authorities write, and have always written, “sanitary.”

“Sanatory,” if there be such a word, derived from sano, sanare, must necessarily mean “curative” or “remedial,” since sanare signifies to cure. Sanitary laws and sanitary precautions are not intended for cure but for prevention. A hospital is a “sanatory” establishment; quarantine is a “sanitary” regulation. “Sanitary” is a word similar to “salutary,” “voluntary,” “arbitrary,” not derived from the verb sanare, to cure, but from the substantive sanitas, health, like “voluntary” from voluntas, and signifies “regarding” or “relating” to health. Sanitary measures are measures relating to health.

The Times, to its credit, has usually resisted the corruption of the English language, and it has now an opportunity of exercising its power against a very flagrant instance of that corruption.

Orthographicus