Practical success in sanitation is impossible without the recognition of mind, both in the actual working of the organs of the living body and in the knowledge and acceptance by mankind of the conditions which are essential to health.
If the human constitution be governed by laws in obedience to which healthy growth is alone possible, then those laws must be carefully sought for before we can build up a science of hygiene. To regard living beings as simply material bodies, without the constant and varying influences of mental action upon the working of those bodies, is an intellectual error which disregards the essential condition of mental harmony in relation to health.
It must also be recognised that whatever may be the discoveries of physiological science, they will remain barren unless applied by individuals. In all the concerns of life, whether in the application of principles or in the unconscious formation of habits, we are compelled to deal with the ceaseless power or effect of Will. To treat even the most ignorant adults by arbitrary, unreasoning compulsion is a scientific blunder.[3]
The Two Problems of Hygiene.—The two fundamental questions for hygiene to solve are therefore: 1st. What are the conditions of healthy growth? 2nd. How can those conditions be secured?
In answering these two fundamental questions the problem of mental action enters into every hygienic section of a Congress, and is the keynote which must be struck if harmony of theory and practice is to be attained.
But in consequence of too narrow a view of hygiene these questions were not solved, and this remarkable assembly of learned men, brought together with such careful preparation and hospitable welcome, produced no practical results of the commanding value that the public had a right to expect from it.
Sanitary legislation was shown to be largely evaded, but the reasons for this unsatisfactory evasion were not examined; the results of experimental research were proved to be strangely contradictory, but the conditions which would harmonize them were not discovered; unproved theories abounded, but the fallacies that vitiated them were not made clear.
Disappointment as to the practical utility of the Congress was widely felt both at home and abroad.
This disappointment with the results of the Congress has been publicly expressed by our foreign guests. A clever abstract of the work done at this Seventh International Hygienic Congress has been published in Paris by the well-known editors of The Review of Hygienic and Sanitary Police. Some noteworthy statements are made in the introduction to this volume which should be seriously considered by all who reverence righteous sanitary science as the foundation of human welfare, but who also know that sanitary science must approve itself to the good sense of a people, or it will be of little practical utility.
Failure of English as well as Foreign Sanitation.—This high French authority declares that notwithstanding the efforts for sanitary improvement in which England has set an example for fifty years, the relative mortality of England has not diminished. It is stated: ‘The subject of the mortality of England, although not touched upon in the Congress, was the subject of most private conversation. The real figures of English mortality show a singular coincidence with the mortality of other European countries. It is shown that in none of these countries has the mortality diminished during the last fourteen or fifteen years, except when the birth-rate has diminished, and only in an exact proportion to this birth-rate.’ England has no better record to show in this respect than her Continental neighbours, notwithstanding the increasing demands of her specialists for extended legislative powers. Our French critics remark that ‘English hygienists of to-day are demanding great administrative centralization; their sanitary laws are rigorous to a degree that other countries would consider excessive; local self-government as well as individual liberty is less and less respected, and, from the statements of specialists interested in the subject, there is reason to believe that at no distant date every branch of public hygiene will be entirely administered by the Central Government.’