![]() The officer dutifully responded to the financial concern at the heart of the question, but interjected what to him was a more pressing matter, namely the influence of railway travelling on the soldiers themselves-or rather, its lack of influence: Gladstone about the potential cost benefit of transporting military troops by railway instead of having them walk on foot. ![]() Footnote 12 Testifying before the Committee on Railways, Quartermaster-general Sir J.W. ![]() According to one contemporary estimate, between 18 no less than 118,000 soldiers together with 12,000 dependents were moved between districts by rail. Already in 1830, just after its opening as the first public railway line in the country, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried soldiers on active duty in order to save them a two-day march. The earliest extension of the railway network ‘coincided with recurrent outbreaks of public disorder’ Footnote 11 during the 1840s, army personnel were being rushed from district to district in order to put down Chartist disturbances. In preceding decades, the dominant assumption had been that the railways had an unparalleled potential to transport humans over long distances not only quickly but also without their bodies or minds undergoing any deterioration whatsoever. This extensive concern for railway-related health hazards represented a remarkable mid-century shift in perspective on public railways and their effect on human bodies. Footnote 9 The traveller might not be consciously aware of the ‘thousands of successive jolts which he experiences’, warned the Lancet, ‘but every one of them tells upon his body’. Footnote 8 Describing a case of such ‘railway sickness’, a travel guide book published the same year as the Lancet’s report concluded that ‘the performance of a journey of a hundred miles within so short a space of time, and at such a rapid pace, had too greatly excited the nervous system, and had otherwise disturbed the functions of a delicate organisation and a debilitated frame’. Footnote 7 Furthermore, declared the medical experts, the ‘constantly present … possibility of collision’ often caused a general ‘condition of uneasiness’ in season-ticket holders and other habitual travellers. Footnote 2 The ‘almost incessant repetition of mere vibrations’, Footnote 3 together with chilling draughts, Footnote 4 the anxiety of being ‘in constant hurry’, Footnote 5 the loud rattling sound of wheels on tracks Footnote 6-in short, the constant jolts and starts of the moving railway carriage that the travelling body had to absorb-could cause nausea, headaches, fatigue, strained muscles, and weakened bones, in particular in those who were already unhealthy. The commission highlighted, for instance, the ‘vague dread of certain undefined consequences to health resulting from influences peculiarly produced by this mode of travelling’. ![]() The Lancet had set down a commission to examine all evidence of railway travelling’s effect on public health, and throughout the 1860s this topic filled its pages with similar examples, as well as theories, diagnoses, and remedies to railway-related ailments psychological or physical. ![]()
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