A national health policy / by Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A national health policy / by Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/136 page 7
    in the best environment we can devise for that life. Naturally, therefore, its meaning varies somewhat among different individuals and different nations; though, of course, all have much in common. Ideals largely determine our mental habits and atti¬ tudes ; and they play a large part in sexual selection. In that way they help to fix the direction of the race by tending to the perpetuation of those qualities and traits which most appeal to us. Almost unconsciously we select, as the fathers or mothers of our children, those whom we should most wish them to resemble. After all, true ideals are no artificial product. They are, by their very nature, mere developments of our primal instincts and impulses. It is those which have not this biological root that are spurious, melodramatic, and rightly to be ridiculed. For such can have no sustained influence on action and play no part in determining our instinctive manifestations. Yet, although ideals are rooted in our inherited impulses, their forms are largely determined by external circumstances ; that is, by a deliberate or accidental education. Here we see the fundamental importance of sound education in any practical health policy. Legislation, without popular sanction, can go but a little way, seeing how largely it depends for its effec¬ tiveness on the ready and intelligent co-operation of the individual. In a complicated society such as ours, the fear of consequences as a motive, even when opera¬ tive—and it is becoming decreasingly so—is self- regarding in the narrowest sense, and therefore wasteful and ineffective all round. It is on the inculcation of active ideals of human life that we must rely if the future is to be full of hope and promise. Even on the most elementary and crudest plane, nothing is possible so long as parents, through ignorance, resent the advice of the school doctor and the most necessary regulations of the sanitary authority. But so long as narrow egoism and crude selfishness persist—and they may long outlive general ignorance—the thoughtful and the
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3