Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/446

 440 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

��STEPHEN HALES, THE PIONEEB IN THE HYGIENE OP

VENTILATION

Bt D. FRASBB HARRIS, H.D., D.Sc., F.R.8.C., F.R.8.B.

PB0FB880B OF PHTSIOLOOT IN DtALHOUSIB UNiyiBSXTr, HALITAX, KOTA SCOTIA

IT has happened again and again in the history of discoveiy that some of the most important advances in a particular science have been made by persons not engaged in the professional pursuit of that subject.

No doubt the f ormjal recognition of public health as a science is of quite recent date, but there have always been those who have recognized the paramount claims of that branch of knowledge now embodied as hygiene or preventive medicine. Medical men, as might be expected, have in all ages been interested in measures that tended to the health of the community as distinguished from that of the individual merely. But persons who were not medical men at all have from time to time either made suggestions of permanent value as touching the health of the people, or, going farther, have actually made contributions to the science of public health of such a kind that without these progress in that science would have been very greatly delayed. The truth of this is strikingly brought out in the life of one of the name of Hales, a clergyman of the Church of England, a man who had neither studied medicine nor taken a medical degree, but who was, nevertheless, the first person in England to make any serious attempt to provide for the systematic supply of fresh air to places where impure air could not leave by natural means. The Reverend Stephen Hales, M.A., D.D., F.B.S., was the pioneer in the hygiene of ventilation.

There have been parallel cases in other sciences: the Marquis of Worcester, though not an engineer, invented the steam pump; Leeuwen- hoek, though not a member of the medical profession, made discoveries of the most fundamental order in physiology and microscopical anat- omy; Captain Cook, though neither a physician nor a biologist, investi- gated from the practical side the causes and incidence of scurvy with such excellent results to the health of sailors that he was awarded the Copley medal of the Royal Society in 1776; Lady Mary Wortley Mon- tagu, the wife of the British ambassador at Constantinople, introduced inoculation for smallpox into England; Helmholtz, though not an oculist, invented the ophthalmoscope; Pasteur, though not a medical practitioner, introduced inoculation of attenuated virus for the cure of hydrophobia; and, in our own day, Metchnikoff, trained as a scientific zoologist, has exercised a most far-reaching influence on the doctrines of bacteriology and practical medicine.

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