The Physician and Human Conservation (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Physician and Human Conservation

The existence of so much disease that is preventable, the increasing amount of insanity, feeble-mindedness and imbecility that are usually evidence of individual and family degeneracy, the poor showing of young men in our recent war conscription, and other conditions of bad import too numerous to be recounted have led me to consider at this time the subject of disease prevention and human conservation. This can only be a suggestion, as there is no time to frame an argument; it can only be a hint of the facts, not a presentation of them.

My subject is not so remote from our specialty as it may seem, for we are interested in disease and its prevention, and conservation deals with both. The great merit of prevention is that it begins at the source and that is the place to stop trouble. To bring a dying man back to life and health is more attractive and picturesque than the homely process of preventing him from being sick. Just a plain healthy man may be useful, but he is not necessarily interesting - society, how ever, prefers that a man should first be healthy. We have wasted a vast amount of human material in the past through mere neglect; we have wasted as much more through being satisfied to care for the wreckage, without considering how to stop the supply. The result has been that while we have been building hospitals and asylums, disease has been increasing with the growth of population, so that the age - old pestilence that walketh in darkness, in the form of devitalizing con ditions, has been breeding disease and degeneracy and pouring its victims through the gates of charity.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.