Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/690

670 results, the expense of nurses and medicines, and, above all, the permanent impairment of the health and shortening of life which thereby ensue, are fruitful sources of the worst misery and the deepest indigence. These conditions become, in turn, the great nurseries for crime, and for filling our poor-houses, asylums, hospitals, and penitentiaries. During the years when an epidemic scourges a city, its business becomes for the time paralyzed, and a serious check is put upon its growth and prosperity.

But, more than these, sickness throughout the United States supports in comparative affluence, at least, 75,000 persons with their families. The physicians and dentists amount in round numbers, according to the last census, to 55,000, and the druggists, pharmaceutists, and patent-medicine venders, to about 20,000 more. Add to all this the munificent charities maintained for those who are directly or indirectly sufferers from the effects of preventable diseases, such as the deaf, the blind, the insane, and the imbecile asylums, and the aggregate outlay for avoidable evils assumes enormous proportions.

In reference to health and sickness, the civilization of the nineteenth century presents this remarkable spectacle: millions of dollars annually spent, indescribable torments and anguish endured from an evil which it is possible, but never seriously attempted, to remove. The dark shadow of a barbarous ignorance yet overspreads the popular mind, that sickness is somehow produced by evil causes, whose dreadful attacks we may patiently watch and fight with drugs, but whose ultimate destruction belongs alone to the gods. The danger of an attack by some dreadful disease is yet looked upon with a feeling akin to superstition, not with the calm confidence of security which a thorough knowledge of cause and effect alone can bestow. Slowly, oh, how slowly! does the human mind awaken to the truth that in this, as in every thing else pertaining to the natural world, nothing happens by chance, nothing of arbitrary will, but all is subject to immutable law. This truth once fully recognized and acted upon, man would exhibit the same power and success in subduing in his own body the one great obstacle to his weal, as he has shown in subduing the obstacles to his weal in the external world, and he will then become the most healthy instead of the most sickly of beings.

The proper means for accelerating such a hygienic reformation consists in making it possible for all to become experts in the application of the science of life. In effecting this, the State has the two great requisites in its own hands: first, to educate and train the youth of our country so that they may realize the importance, and be enabled to apply, sanitary science for themselves; and, second, to make it possible, wherever there is a dense population, for every one to carry the laws of hygiene into effect, and to protect the people against those who have disregarded its injunctions, and so have become focii [sic] for multiplying and disseminating the seeds of infectious diseases.