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.

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    with infective material derived from the noses, throats, and ears of patients in the contagious disease wards, and with material from suppurating wounds, and placed these on tables, chairs, floor, and mantelpiece of a room, which was then fumigated with every known material of fumigation—sulphur, formaldehyde, etc. The room was then sealed up and left for varying periods. He found that not a germ was injured. These instances might be multiplied indefinitely. At any given stage of human knowledge, a certain amount of sickness is preventable, whilst a certain amount may be classed as unavoidable. With the progress of knowledge, various diseases, previously rightly placed in the second class, are transferred to the former. Malaria and yellow fever have been re¬ classified in this way. Consumption is well on the way to transference. Others, including our present most deadly enemy, cancer, still remain among the un- avoidables, though here, also, we may hope that the knowledge of its causation will be won before long. A national health policy must concern itself with both groups. It is clearly a waste of energy and effort to devote to the relief or individual cure of preventible disease time and money, and skill, which might better be devoted to removing its causes. This does not mean that those whom we have allowed to fall victims, even to preventible diseases, are to be left to their fate. But it does mean that our principal effort should be directed to stopping the leak. If, as is an established fact, con¬ sumption could be reduced to a tithe of its present magnitude, by diverting half our crowded city popula¬ tions to small industrial towns of the garden city type, it is clearly madness to go on allowing fresh industries to be established and fresh houses built in those great spreading wens which are gradually eating up our country and our race. No subsequent expenditure on sanatoriums, cod liver oil, and funerals, will make good the national loss which our momentary greed will have cost us. King Edward's remark, “ If disease is pre-
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