“If you had the power of a czar, could you destroy tuberculosis and typhoid fever, and also greatly reduce the number of deaths from pneumonia?”
Professor Fisher and Dr. McCormack replied promptly in the affirmative. Evidently, I might as well have asked Dr. Hutchinson if, having a glass of water, he could drink it. He was most matter of fact. Without a doubt, tuberculosis could be destroyed. So could typhoid fever, which is solely a filth disease that no one can get without eating or drinking matter that has passed through the stomach of a typhoid victim. Parenthetically, I may say that I heard Dr. Hutchinson tell a committee of the United States Senate that if a National Department of Health were established and properly administered, half of the crime would cease in twenty-five years. Dr. Hutchinson also said that it was entirely possible to save the babies that died from preventable diseases—dysentery, for instance. The lowest estimate of the number of babies who die every year from preventable diseases is 100,000.
Ask the same question of any physician in the country who is worth his salt and he will give the same answer. Thus well known are the methods by which the great diseases might be destroyed.
The way to wipe out tuberculosis quickly, for instance, would be to destroy every habitation that is known to be hopelessly infected—and there are many such—permit no habitation to be erected without provision for sufficient sunlight and air; permit no factory or other workplace to be erected without sufficient provision for sunlight and fresh air—and destroy such workplaces as now exist without this provision; reduce the cost of living so that the millions who now cannot afford to live in sanitary homes and buy adequate food could do so; isolate the infected and educate the people with regard to the necessity of sleeping with their bedroom windows wide open.
If this program were put through, tuberculosis would cease as soon as those who are now infected should either have recovered or died. It is because such a program has not been put through that, according to Professor Fisher, there are always 500,000 Americans suffering from tuberculosis, and the annual death-roll from the disease is 150,000. Any municipal government, if it were disposed to do so and the courts were willing to let it do so, could put through the housing part of the program in a single summer. The dangerous habitations could be condemned. The government, if necessary, could build and rent at cost, sanitary houses in the suburbs, as the government of New Zealand does for its people. Congress, the President and the courts, if they were disposed to do so, could reduce the cost of living. If the government can teach farmers by mail how to prevent hog-cholera, there would seem to be no reason why it should not teach human beings by mail to breathe fresh air both night and day.
What stands in the way of immediately putting through such a program? Nothing in the world except the men whose property would be destroyed, or whose stealings in food-prices would be stopped. The property loss would be enormous. (Think of calling the destruction of a lot of death-traps a “loss.”) The “value” of the property destroyed might be a billion dollars. Maybe it would be two billions. What difference need it make if it should take five billion dollars’ worth of labor, lumber, bricks, steel and other materials to replace death-traps with life-traps? One hundred and fifty thousand lives would be saved every year from tuberculosis alone, and the rebuilding operations would create greater prosperity for labor than was ever created by any act of Congress.
A hundred years ago, no one knew how to stamp out tuberculosis. What good does it do us to know how? We are not permitted to apply our knowledge. We can peck away if we want to, at the edge of the problem, but we mustn’t strike at the middle. If we should, we might cut somebody’s dividends. We might interfere with the “vested interests” of the owners of the cellars in which 25,000 New York families live, or with the owners of the 101,000 windowless rooms in which New Yorkers live, or with the owners of the unsanitary houses and factories in other cities. Our public officials know better than to try to do anything really radical in the health line. They have condemned just enough pestholes to know how dangerous it is to political prospects to grapple with property, and enforced just enough of the factory laws to know how dangerous it is to try to enforce factory laws at all.
In New York City, according to Tenement House Commissioner Murphy, 45 persons are burned alive every year in death-trap tenements. A new tenement house law prohibits the erection of death-traps, and in the new tenements there are no cremations. But the old death-traps are permitted to stand. In ten years, 450 more persons will have been burned alive. In 10 years, 1,500,000 more Americans will have died from tuberculosis.
“Of the people living in the United States to-day,” said J. Pease Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale, “more than 8,000,000 will die of tuberculosis.” Between the ages of 20 and 30, every third death is from consumption, and, at all ages, the mortality from the same disease is one in nine.
We now censure ancient kings for having slaughtered men in war for private profit. But what ancient king ever made such a record in war as our dividend-takers make in peace? What ancient king, in his whole lifetime, ever slew 8,000,000 men? What modern war marked the end of so many men as tuberculosis kills in a year? During the four years of the Civil War, only a little more than 200,000 men were killed in battle. Tuberculosis kills 300,000 Americans every two years. Other diseases that could be prevented if dividends were out of the way bring up the total of avoidable deaths in this country to 1,200,000 every two years.