A Doctors Viewpoint

’ A Doctor s Viewpoint John Bess ner Huber, A . M . , M . D . h Editor , The D ietetic an d Hygienic Gazette ; Author , Co ns umptio n ’ and Civilization ( Lipp incott s ) Fellow o f the American M e dical As sociatio n and o f the New York f tc A cademy o M edicine , Etc . , E . GAZETTE PUBLISHING 87 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK 1 9143 Copyright , , by HU B E R JOHN B . Jill is Qi n , 3 ? 9 5 1 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS A Twen tieth Century Ep ic The Elimination of Tuberculosis Danger Signals The Prevention of Ca nce r ’ Don t Be a Hermi t Crab The Cowa rd'ice o f Brave Men Woman ’s Seven Ages Let Us Go Ou t Into the Sun shin e Sense Training Eugenics Medical Research and Educ ation Editorial Effu sions How Genius Mani fests Its elf The Humanness of Scien tists Pulicide U n s c i e n t ific Futilitie s Cupid in Psychology Social Exc itement s Psychic Rese a r ch Factors of S a fety Killing and Conserva tion The Ethnic s of In fection Consumption and Civilizatio n Mongrelized Races — A1 1 Anti Vivisectio n Pl ay Spugs and Sp e fs Eutha nasi a The Philosophy of Pr ayer To L M H . W o uld it w e r e w o r thi e r $ PREFATORY NOTE A s hort preface ; since nobody ever reads a long l a one . Much of our interest in life ies in how we p ’ — p r e ci a t e one another s ways of looking at i t the way t he - of the counsellor, Sky pilot, the painter, the farmer, the policeman on the fixed post , the steeplej ack, the man on the street , the woman in the wrapper . If this ’ book gets carried in anybody s coat pocket , or se cures place under the evening lamp and besides the armchair it will be because it has been written from a doctor’ s viewpoint of our human relations and of our civilization . Some of the matter in the following pages has ap ’ ear ed T he Amer i c an Revi ew o Revi ews Co lli er s p in f , ’ Weekl Har er s Wee kl T he N ew Yo r k E veni n y, p y, g Po s t Ou t do o r Li e a nd R ec r e a t i o n Kn o wled e S c i en , f , g , ’ t i c Amer i c an Li i n c o t t s M a azin e T he Br i ti s h fi , pp g , e ul i Jo ur n al o f T ub r c o s s and other Journals . To the editors of these publications I make my grateful a o w e d e n t s kn o l gm . A TWENTIETH CENTUR Y EPIC Venerable folk can to- day recall how in their child hood t he medieval conception o f di sease still persisted —that the forces evolving pestilence were mi ghtier ul than man co d hope to struggle with, too awful to be defied ; the only escape for humankind lay in p r op i t i at i n g, if possible , those supernatural powers . Hosts must s uccumb when the angel of death spread his wings on the blast , a cloud passed over a doomed city and from it a retributive hand scattered upon an evil gen e r at i on the seeds of destruction . Such images permeated literature and made it mag ifi t n c en . The poetic temperament may a little regret the extent to which the modern science of preventive medicine has damaged imaginative literature , so that s u such sublime pictures as Milton portrayed, such e r V 1s 10n s p b as Byron and Coleridge saw, cannot now get themselves expressed ; and ( since human interest depends largely on the extent to which events imagined may conceivably enter into human experience) would be little appreciated if they were published . We could - not to day enj oy , in quite the same way , another “ ” Masque of the Red Death , in which the bubonic “ plague was personified ; nor another such work as The ” Wandering Jew, who personified the cholera that - stalked spectre like through three continents . The modern idea of warfare against disease w as ex “ pressed by Pasteur : It is within human power to banish all parasitic (infectious ) diseases from the face 9 10 “ A DOCTOR’S VIEWPOINT ” ~ of the earth . Here surely is a more reverent c on c ep t i o n than that medieval one ; fo r it does not hold fl e diseases to be scourges in ict d by a cruel deity . And it is a j uster conception, for it holds most pe stilence - to be practically man made ; wherefore , and by the same - l token, such pestilences are man preventab e . And we are concluding that man, not God, fixes the death rate . hi s Here, as elsewhere in li fe, it is for man to work out N o r own salvation . does the modern Prometheus defy divinity ; but seeks , how successfully we shall see, by hi s - ul the exercise of God given fac ties , to free his race ’ - ff of aeon long su erings and disasters . Morse s first tele “ ” : gram read What hath God wrought . We are now to consider what God hath wrought thr ough human a e g n cy . PRE V E N TIV E M E D ICIN E Our modern epic begins , then, with the birth of pre v e n t iv e n medicine, now the most pervasively be ignant li e force in civi zation . Past ur was the accoucheur when b a ct e he demonstrated microscopic parasites ( germs , i c ria , bacill ) to be the essential auses of the infections ; each infection having i t s specific and invariable germ . let mi And us pre se here that , in science at least , great names are landmarks ; and the owners of these names have traversed and gleaned in fields where many a de voted and forgotten laborer had delved and sown and pathetically sweated blood in his altruistic zeal . In science at least n o man works in vain . Full many an one , worthy of an elegy, has given his whole life to establishing a fact o r indeed only an item to a fact ; l ~ his work unrea ized , ridicule and even persecution often hi times s only compensation , throughout perhaps in the meanest destitution ; yet his life and his work have be en absolutely essential to the building o f a mighty A TWENTIETH CENTURY EPIC 1 1 M fabric . artyrs have been many among such, dying of the di seas es from which t hey sought to defend others ; l ul be . knowing too , fu l well, what their own fate wo d Nor does it in any W1s e detract from the gratitude due the a gre t man , that he has profited by the labors of e an hi s n oth rs , adding what he c of own, scrutinizi g every detail, every datum, permeating and illuminating hi s all with own genius , cementing the mass with his ’ Jen n e r s ul fo r own deductions . Thus did inoc ations , vai n e example, make clear the way for D a and Lister, r Tyndall and Pasteu . i r Upon the foundati—on then, thus la d by Pasteu , did Koch and his c o worker s bring to maturity the hu science of preventive medicine . And what phase of - ? man existence does it not to day influence Personal , s domestic , chool, communal hygiene , as we now under s . f tand these terms , are derived from it In ants no di longer die by spensations of Providence , but by germ has laden milk . Preventive medicine become adequately filt r a ti o n— equipp ed to deal with housing, sewage , well nigh all problems of rural , civic, State , national , inter a national, world sanitation . V st tracts of hitherto pes tilen t n land , formerly impossible of huma habitation, are now made salubrious and capable of most profitable a agriculture . Only Orient l fatalism stands in the way o f li i - e minat ng those age long plagues , which are still n r ur in u t ed the bosom of Old Mother India , and go forth on their ghastly business from that dreadful i - e progenitor . But now w th ever decr asing frequency ’ l Haflki n e i and viru ence ; for Ross , Manson , , and Sh ga an d their confreres have been and are making tremeu dous progres s in their titanic work against those i n ’ fec t i ons r . Af ica s most dreadful infection, the sleeping sicknes s is als o ei e r , b ng master d , la gely through the 12 A DOCTOR’ S VIEWPOINT K h work of och, E rlich, and their colleagues . Malaria, that tyrant whi ch only a score of years ago dominated i s ff nl half the world, now su ered o y by the supine . e Tub rculosis , which since the beginning of the race has been the Captain of the Men of Death, can also , mi if we but will, be eli nated from human experience .

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