Based on this are the great factors of prevention, namely, quarantine and segregation, which are practically one and the same. It stands to reason that an infected center should be removed or so isolated as to be no longer dangerous. For the same reason the infected center should not be allowed to enter a new community. Based upon this principle our systems of quarantine and segregation should be greatly strengthened. It is not a question of the wishes of the individual in this case; if it were, no ship would be detained and quarantined, and few people would go to a smallpox hospital or tuberculosis sanitarium. The principle of the welfare of the race as superior to the interests of the individual is dominant in these particulars. Tennyson, who foresaw many of the great truths of science, has beautifully presented this principle in his well-known stanza:
“Are God and nature then at strife,
That nature sends such fearful dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life.”
In the protection of the public health it will become as much the duty of each State and Nation to provide sanitary detention camps for infectious diseases and rigidly enforce residence therein, as it is to watch the border and establish strict quarantine.
IMMUNITY.
It is evident, however, that it will take a long course of education and almost revolution in the sentiment of the people, to establish a system of segregation and quarantine as rigid and as perfect as that which is outlined. What then is the next best resort? I answer immunization. If we cannot keep the infectious organism from contact with the human body, we should endeavor to make the body immune from its ravages. There are two methods which might be adopted; the one which could be most generally practiced is that of good nutrition, proper housing, fresh air, pure water and pure foods. The child that sleeps in the open and eats an abundance of pure, wholesome foods and takes a proper amount of exercise, will escape most of the diseases of infancy and grow into manhood with a body immune to almost every infectious germ. I need not go into detail in regard to the actual mechanism of immunity to prove the fact that a well-nourished body, sustained by blood of high nutritious power and bearing its untold millions of organisms, armed cap-a-pie to destroy intruders, is a sufficient illustration of immunity. The physiologists will describe to you the nature of the phagocytose opsins, and the hormones by means of which this immunity is secured.
For the above reason the campaign for pure and wholesome food lies at the very foundation of the protection of the public health. It is a mistaken idea that a food is not to be condemned unless it produces diseases. A food is to be condemned which is in any way so debased as to undermine nutrition and impoverish the blood, and thus open the door of the body to the invitation of every germ that may be coming along the road. Thus the addition to foods of bodies which in themselves are not poisonous or harmful, but which debase the product and make it less palatable or less nutritious, is a crime of the same magnitude as that of adding to the foods poisonous and deleterious ingredients or of suffering it to fall into advanced stages of decomposition.
What a sorry spectacle, in the light of these facts, was presented at the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography at Washington last week, when Professor Long, member of the Remsen Board, which has validated the use of some of these poisons, attempted to justify the addition of an active drug to the food supply of the nation! Such an act was so foreign to the purposes of the Congress as to constitute an unpardonable anachronism. Dr. Long was one of the most enthusiastic protagonists of benzoate of soda in the Federal Court in Indianapolis when those who secured the appointment of the Referee Board in defiance of law sought to force the people of Indiana to eat their adulterated products. The people ask for bread and Dr. Long and his assistants give them a stone in the form of the moribund benzoate.