Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/689

Rh would be in no danger; all the while carefully stamping out with disinfectants the means or the germs by which disease and death are carried from house to house.

It should for these reasons be a maxim with the law-making power to protect the health and lives of the people, whenever individual effort is powerless or insufficient; and, moreover, to provide that pure air, wholesome drink and food, should be made possible to every inhabitant of a town or city. If the refuse matter and excreta of a city are not promptly and carefully removed; if the streets are not of the proper width, and regularly cleansed; if houses are allowed to be so constructed that effective ventilation is impossible; if the water-supply is insufficient, or tainted with organic matter; and if persons are allowed free entrance, suffering with dangerous infectious diseases, and no well-directed efforts are made to destroy the noxious matters thus introduced, misery, disease, and a fearful rate of mortality, will be the normal results. The few who make diligent efforts to apply the rules of sanity are powerless in removing the obvious causes of the prevailing misery and death-gloom, and, like Lot, for safety, must flee the city.

With a private and public hygiene thoroughly understood and effectively maintained, there is not an intelligent physician in our land who would not acknowledge that the result would be to diminish the prevalence of disease at least one-half, and to send the average expectation of life, at a bound, up a decade of years.

Taking into consideration the fact that it is within the power of sanitary regulations to prevent yellow fever, as was shown in New Orleans while under occupancy during the late war by the Union forces for more than two years, where over 100,000 unacclimated soldiers were stationed, or passed through the city, without a single case of the disease originating there; that it is possible to stamp out the germs of Asiatic cholera and small-pox, and say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther;" and taking into consideration that the average duration of life has been extended during the past two centuries from nineteen to thirty-one years, by a slow appreciation and imperfect application of sanitary law alone; taking these, and many other facts of a like character, into consideration, it does not seem too much to say that it is within the power of any one with a moderately good constitution to say whether he will choose to cut short his days and die the violent death of disease, or whether he will extend the powers of his body to their normal limits, and so die from the effects of old age, or from the gradual wearing out of the most imperfect organ of his body.

Pecuniarily, the results of properly-applied sanitary law would be immensely successful; the cent of prevention would be more than worth the dollar of cure. It is estimated that from a half to three-fourths of the inhabitants of our principal cities are sick some time during each year of ordinary salubrity. The loss of time which