Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/229

 THE CIVIC PROBLEM 2 1 3

might be reduced one-half, and thus the real wealth of the city be enormously increased.

Take, for instance, the economic loss due to the familiar disease known as consumption. The number of deaths annually in the United States from this disease is estimated at from 145,000 to 160,000. A recent writer declares that "one in three of all the deaths between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four years is due to consumption; one in four, between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four." And he continues :

These are the years wherein a worker is at his best, when he repays to the community what it has spent upon him in his nurture and upbringing. .... The average man's earnings in the working period of his life are about $12,600. The average earnings of a consumptive, taking into the calculation the short period which he earns full wages, the period when he can work only part of the time at what light tasks he can find, and the still longer period when all that he can do is to gasp for breath, a burden to his family, and more than a burden, a menace the average earnings of a man that dies of

consumption are no more than $4,075, a loss of $8,525 on every man

Leaving out of the calculation all that it costs for medicines and nursing, counting only the loss of wages, we are out more than a billion and a third of dollars every year by the Great White Plague. It is as if every year the city of Columbus, Ohio, were utterly depopulated and not a living soul left in it. It is as if ten times what it costs us for the postal system of the United States every year were absolutely thrown away, and we got nothing for it. For this loss of wages by consumptives is a needless loss. They have to die some time, it is true, but they need not thus die before their time.

So much for a single preventable disease. As a further illus- tration, consider the loss from typhoid fever. Thirty-five thous- and deaths a year in this country are due to it; and yet medical authorities assure us it is one of the most readily controlled and preventable diseases. An epidemic of typhoid in a city, town, or village is an evidence of culpable ignorance on the part of the people or criminal negligence on the part of the authorities.

Now consider what could be done 1, if the municipality gave the same attention to health as to wealth. New York, with attention to the matter by no means ideal, has reduced its mor- tality from consumption 40 per cent. Chicago, by such care as she has given to the promotion of health, has reduced her death- rate from 73 per 1,000 in 1854 to 15.43 in 1904. London has