Volume 1

The standard physician : a new and practical encyclopaedia of medicine and hygiene especially prepared for the household / edited by Sir James Crichton-Browne [and others].

Date:
1908-1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The standard physician : a new and practical encyclopaedia of medicine and hygiene especially prepared for the household / edited by Sir James Crichton-Browne [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/430 (page 5)
    EDITORIAL PREFACE The general utility of this work, The Standard Physician, and the value of the guidance it affords, within a well-dehned area, in plain and clear language, can scarcely be over-estimated. Some time ago, the late Lord Derby, with great jierspicacity, called attention to three lines of defence against disease—the public, the ])rofessionah and the private—and declared that, from ewu'v point of view, the last of these is, and must alwavs be, the most salient and important. The first line of defence indicated by Lord Derby has been vastlv strengthened of late years. Central and Local vSanitary Authorities have come into e.xistence ; specially qualified Medical Officers of Health have been a})pointed in almost ever\’ district of the country ; legislation more or less judicious, directed against several conditions productive of disease, has been undertaken on the large scale, and (Governments have begun to show an intelligent a])preciation of h\'giene as the basis of good citizenship. Lord Derby’s second line of defence, the ])rofessional one, has also been fortified, for medical men are now better educated and equipped than they have ever been before, and are as eager as ever, with unselfish devotion, to diminish the prevalence of these states of ill-health on which their living dej)ends. But it is in Lord Derby’s third line of defence—the private one, which ought to be the strongest—that weakness is still manifested, and in connection with which the need of support and reconstruction is urgent. The enormous sale of empirical remedies, and their indiscriminate emplo\-- ment, the success that attends a host of impudent charlatans, the vogue of every novel and fashionable healing craze, and the organised endeavours to cheapen medical ad\fice, all betoken a dense and widespread ignorance of the very elements of medical science, and the ascendency of the mischievous credulity to which that ignorance gives rise. Innumerable lives are being sacrificed to the Moloch of quackery, countless constitutions are