Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/405

Rh public life in the interest of what he conceives to be professional ethics is capable of a richer fruitage yet, in the defiance of misconstruction, when impelled to whatever performance of public duty he can justify to himself.

While the penalties of ignorance in things sanitary and hygienic are growing more severe as our communal life becomes more complex and crowded, there are, as we have seen, a good many ways in which the lessons of modern sanitation can be learned. Some of these lessons may wisely, as I think, be woven into the educational equipment of the young. They may be acquired in later life from books. Many may be assimilated under the kindly offices of the physician. Much is taught by such public measures as health boards may enforce. But, learned these lessons must be sooner or later, and learned they are too often now at the bedside and the grave.

Physicians know well enough that a stringent system of dairy inspection should be at once and widely enforced, and it is really for them more than for any other class of citizens to say how many more object lessons will be necessary like those recently enforced at Montclair, at Waterbury, and at Stamford, before all such caterers shall be compelled to conform to the rules of sanitary decency. The prevention of pollution of water supplies, the compelling of reasonable cleanliness in public vehicles for human transportation by land and by sea, the enforcement of precautions against the spread of disease in public hostelries and places of assembly, the organization of a national health bureau—these are all tasks which must speedily be undertaken, and they may be led to rich accomplishment if the physician will but hold more clearly in his consciousness his primal duty as a citizen.

In all that which I have urged about the more precise physical and, I might almost say, mechanical nature of the professional duties which in the new light the physician is called upon to assume, I have purposely left largely out of sight his more intimate personal relationships to those to whom he ministers. And yet, lest one should fear that in our eager search for light we overlook the man in the machine, I should like to assure the timid that all that which always has and ever will dignify and ennoble his calling, as one who is strong serving the weak, remains unchanged in the physician, and is potent or feeble, not in ratio to his scientific knowledge, but as he is more or less honest, keen of insight, high of purpose, sympathetic; and finds its highest fruition joined to good judgment and self-reliance, and to whatever confidence-winning and hope-inspiring qualities he can command.

It is not easy to estimate accurately the scope and value of contemporary achievement. But as I look over the field of medicine, with all its varying lights and shades, it seems to me that