THE GROWTH OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
Sanitary science, hygiene, or preventive medicine may claim to be one of the brightest spots in the history of the nineteenth century. Public hygiene was cultivated among the Egyptians, and in the Mosaic law it reached a remarkable organization. The personal hygiene of the Greeks was embraced in the saying, “The fair mind in the fair body,” and the value of exercise and training was fully recognized. The Romans, too, in public and private hygiene, were our superiors in the matter of water supply and baths. But modern sanitary science has a much wider scope and is concerned with the causes of disease quite as much as with the conditions under which these diseases prevail. The foundations of the science were laid in the last century with Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. Howard, too, had grasped the association of fever with overcrowding in the jails, while the possibility of the prevention of scurvy had been shown by Captain Cook and by Sir Gilbert Blaine.
Preventive medicine was a blundering, incomplete science until bacteriology opened unheard-of possibilities for the prevention of disease. Before discussing some of the victories of preventive medicine it will be well to take a brief survey of the growth of the following subject: