The experimental method popularized in Baconian philosophy gave an impetus to the study of the physical sciences, but many decades passed before notable deeds were recorded. It was the nineteenth century, scientific in spirit and achievement, that made vital the long result of time and opened a perspective before undreamed of. The awakened health conscience of today is the crystallized result.
In scientific annals, the discoveries of the bacteriologist rank among the first. Perhaps, in the evolution of knowledge no truths are more potential. Within a generation the influence is marked, not only in relation to the individual and community, but in effect on the civilized world. The sanitarian with this knowledge was enabled to demonstrate control of environment. The success of the experiment has opened a new world just as surely as did the discovery of October, 1492.
The changed viewpoint of the relative value of hygiene in its application to life is due not wholly to the discoveries in medical science. It is one phase of the general awakening to the defects of the present social order: a manifestation of the modern attitude toward “waste.” Efficiency implies economy, not alone of expenditure, but of material resource and vital force.
Conservation and preservation of the material wealth of the country is dominant in the intellectual activity of all enlightened people. But it becomes increasingly apparent that the Nation which conserves its mines, forests, soil and sources of power is poor indeed if its men lack virility and mental initiative. This thought is back of the public health movement. The impulse is in part commercial, in part scientific. It grows out of recognition of the futility of remedial and philanthropic measures and the conviction of the potentialities of science for human betterment. In import the movement is ethical and spiritual; it is beyond question the greatest of modern times.
This meeting is significant of the changed attitude toward the Nation’s greatest natural resource—its people. The Congress is national, its purpose conservation, its main topic—to quote from the invitation—the conservation of vital resources. There is significance also in the topics selected for discussion in the health section. They relate to the larger aims of sanitary science. In the popular mind health work has reference only to superficial conditions, control of epidemics, cleaning of streets and similar activities, but the hygienist knows that sanitary regeneration means an attack on many existing institutions, customs, practices and methods that lie deep in the roots of the social structure.
Housing, child labor, industrial occupations, labor insurance, vital statistics, food supply, community methods and conditions are the subjects chosen for discussion. Their primary importance is apparent.
The period of twenty minutes allotted for the opening of this division makes imperative only brief suggestive statements of the essentials in their relation to public health and individual well-being.
Mr. Lawrence Veiller, in the Annals of the American Academy, says: “We have paid dear for our slums.... No one has ever attempted to estimate the cost to the Nation of our bad housing conditions, because it is an impossible task.... Who can say of the vast army of the unemployed how large a portion of the industrially inefficient are so because of lowered physical vitality caused by disadvantageous living conditions? Of the burden which the State is called on to bear in the support of almshouses for the dependent, hospitals for the sick, asylums for the insane, prisons and reformatories for the criminal, what portion can fairly be attributed to adverse early environment?” Describing surroundings, the author continues: “The sordidness of it all, the degrading baseness of it, unfortunately is withheld from the eyes of most of us. What it can mean to the people who have to live in the midst of it we can but faintly conceive. Let us frankly admit that these conditions result in imposing upon the great mass of our working people habits of life that are more compatible with the life of animals than with that of human beings.”
Moreover, not alone in the slums do these conditions exist. In almost every city of the Union, a few blocks from the main thoroughfares, there are congested districts unspeakably bad.
With the knowledge we now have of the relation to health and sickness of air, sunlight and propagating agencies of disease incident to dirt, it is nothing short of criminal to tolerate such conditions. If physical suffering only were the result, indifference would be unpardonable, but overcrowded homes, insanitary in every respect, make for low standards of decency and morality. Vice, with its correlatives, disease and pauperism result. Often crime and insanity make the chain complete. The conditions of life in the middle ages as recorded in history seem to us barbarous in the extreme; relatively, ours really are. Then, there was no certainty as to the effect of insanitary environment; the people did not know; we do, yet with inexplicable indifference communities not only let the worst obtain, but they permit a perpetuation of the system. Authorities stand aghast at the expense involved in the tearing away of a whole section of a city, but the cost of such a measure easily, often probably, may become a mere item in comparison with the economic loss from an epidemic of a virulent type.