Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment

Chapter VIII

Both child and adult to be protected from their own ignorance. Educative value of law and of fines for disobedience. Compulsory sanitation by municipal, state, and federal regulations. Instructive inspection.

The strength of the State is the sum of all the effective people.

Dr. Edward Jarvis, Massachusetts State Board of Health, 1874.

When the Americans took charge of Bilibid Prison in Manila the death rate was 238 per 1,000 per year: by improving sanitary conditions, this death rate was reduced to about 75 per 1,000: here it remained stationary until it was discovered that a very high percentage of the prisoners were infected with hookworms and other intestinal parasites: then a systematic campaign was inaugurated to expel these worms, and when this was done the death rate fell to 13.5 per 1,000.

C. W. Stiles.

So the duties and responsibilities of a Health Department are not only changed, but they are very greatly increased and are constantly increasing. And on broad lines to cause the citizen to do the things he can and ought to do, and then to do for him the things that he cannot do, but which should be done, is the duty of the State, and that, being interpreted, means the real prevention of disease.

Eugene H. Porter, Report, New York State Department of Health, 1909.

The whole difference of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense successes, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships explained. In a sense, scientific research is a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive.

H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old.

Public or governmental hygiene has been chiefly concerned with pure air and pure food, and with organisms producing epidemic diseases. Boards of health are a recent invention, and in this country they have as yet been only imperfectly developed. They can never become the power they should be until, first, public opinion better realizes their usefulness and the fact that their cost to the taxpayer is saved many times over by the prevention of death and disease; second, more and better health legislation is enacted—national, state, and municipal; and, third, special training is secured for what is really a new profession, that of a public health officer.

Report on National Vitality.