Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/654

 634 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

been those which have technical knowledge of disease, but rather those which know less of germs and symptoms and prophylaxis than of luxuries and the pleasures of conspicuous consumption. The need is, therefore, in America, that the voting classes identify public-health work, not with diseases, which they do not understand, but with the advantages of cleanliness and health, which they can readily understand, because to these is attached a social, even a commercial, value. To that end it is important that we know the historical development of sanitation and its present relation to our theories of consumption and monopoly taxation.

Chronologically there have been seven clearly marked stages in the evolution of what we now call public-health administra- tion. Each state and each city, if left to itself, passes through the same stages in its administration, even where a complete code is legislated, not evolved. To abridge the process is the professed aim of central governments today. But where a complete sanitary code is accepted by a newborn town as a condition to its incorporation, we still have the seven distinct motives represented.

The first period is that of racial tutelage, of pain economy, when the primary lessons of personal hygiene are learned. Through the distribution of plant and animal life, of heat and moisture, primitive man was forced to a nomadic life, and per- force enjoyed pure air, pure water, and pure soil. In his conflict with nature he learned to shun certain plants as poisonous, and to reject discolored and offensive water or meats. But when gregarious man settled in confined limits for definite and pro- longed periods, nature could no longer perform the work of scavenger ; sanitation must become conscious, and receive the sanction of law. The dead must be buried in Arabia, or embalmed along the Nile, offal removed and buried, lepers ban- ished from camp or town, swine flesh avoided in Palestine, and all flesh eschewed in Buddha's realms. How costly were these lessons of community life we may judge from the stringency of the persisting codes among the Hindoos, or even the Jewish regulations as to intermarriage, kosher, etc. Agassiz was inter-