If duties are to be measured by what things cost and the havoc they work, then diseases like consumption and typhoid fever should certainly find more people who would be willing to devote more of their time, energy and means to eradicate at least some of the conditions presented in the following statement:
Every day in the year there are two million people seriously sick in the United States. Some of this can never be prevented, but it is conservatively estimated that our annual loss from preventable diseases alone is $2,000,000,000 per year. Consumption alone formerly cost the United States over $1,000,000,000 a year. Since the discovery of the germ by Dr. Koch and of the improved methods of prevention and cure it has been shown that where this knowledge is applied seventy-five per cent of the loss from consumption can be prevented. Typhoid fever costs the country $350,000,000 a year. The city of Pittsburg alone has, by careful investigation, been shown to have lost $3,142,000 from typhoid fever in one year. The discovery that typhoid is produced by a special germ, which is usually gotten from the water or milk supply or from flies, has made it possible to control this expensive disease. As soon as all our citizens have good sanitary training, this $350,000,000 expense for typhoid can be completely eliminated. It has been shown that in the numerous cities in which the water supply alone has been made sanitary, typhoid has been reduced on the average seventy-one per cent.—New York, Evening Post.
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Health by Singing—See [Singing Conducive to Health].
HEALTH, CARE OF
Spare diet and constant exercise in the keen morning air helped to endow Wesley with that amazing physical toughness which enabled him, when eighty-five years old, to walk six miles to a preaching appointment, and declare that the only sign of old age he felt was that “he could not walk nor run quite so fast as he once did.”—W. H. Fitchett, “Wesley and His Century.”
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HEALTH, ECONOMICS OF
Samuel Hopkins Adams writes of the economic value of pure food as follows:
Sterilization was tried in Rochester. It did not work well. The milk was not nutritious. Then Dr. Goler hit upon what seems to me the centrally important truth in the milk problem; that not the milk itself, but everything with which it comes in contact, should be made germ-proof. And as the basis upon which it all rests, stands the vital lesson of hygienic economics which this country is learning with appreciably growing enlightenment; that bad air, bad water, bad housing, bad sewering, dirty streets, and poor or impure food of whatever sort, cheaper tho they may be in the immediate expense, come back upon a community or a nation, in the long run, with a bill of arrears upon which the not-to-be-avoided percentage is appallingly exorbitant. (Text.)—McClure’s Magazine.