Everyman in health and in sickness / edited by Dr. Harry Roberts.

  • Harry Roberts
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Everyman in health and in sickness / edited by Dr. Harry Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/841
    Introduction The problems of health and disease concern every one, and interest nearly every one; yet there are few subjects about which ignorance is more widespread. Nor is this ignorance limited to any one class; the ideas and superstitions of the ‘educated’ being little less absurd than those of the illiterate. For this intellectual confusion, doctors are in part to blame. They have, through the centuries, been popularly credited with powers and with knowledge far beyond those which they could justly claim. The practice of medicine, consequently, has tended to become a mystery, based on secret doctrines known only to the initiate. That, however, is not the attitude of the leaders of the medical profession of to-day; and for the persistent misconception of the lay-public they cannot be held responsible. Doctors now realize, more clearly than do other people, that in the pursuit of health and in the fight against disease the individual man and woman must con¬ sciously and intelligently participate, if success is to be attained. Without widespread knowledge, true hygiene cannot flourish. We cannot safely rely on our instincts for guidance; for our primitive reactions are no longer apt to an environment which we have changed out of all recognition. Every one agrees that the owner and driver of a motor car should understand something of its mechanism, of the care needed to maintain it in a state of efficiency, and of the signs which suggest the expediency of taking it to a garage for expert atten¬ tion. Surely the possession of similar knowledge by the owner of that much more complicated and personally valuable engine, the human body and mind, is equally desirable. It has recently been said that the average length of human life could be increased by not less than fifteen years, if more people knew what is already known by some, and if the knowledge that has been established were but applied. Ignorance, moreover, does not always take a passive form, or, at any rate, does not always lead to passivity. In the absence of knowledge, man readily becomes enslaved by didactic cliches—often traditional truths which time has turned into fallacies. The result is that popular hygienic notions are still for the most part as fantastic as they were in the days of witch-burning. In this book, a number of doctors with knowledge and experience of the matters with which they severally deal have collaborated to explain to Everyman and Everywoman the more important of the established
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