Preventive hygiene is not an essential part of the training of American physicians or nurses to-day. Not only are there no colleges of preventive hygiene, but medical schools have not provided individual courses. It is possible for a man to graduate with honors from our leading medical colleges without knowing what "vital statistics" means. Even boards of health, their duties and their educational opportunities, are not understood by graduates; it is an accident if the "social and economic aspects of medical practice," "statistical fallacies," "hospital administration," "infant mortality," are familiar terms. It is for this reason, rather than because physicians are selfish, that indispensable and beneficent legislation is so generally opposed by them when the prerogatives of their profession seem in danger. Practically every important sanitary advance of the past century has been fought at the outset by those whose life work should have made them see the need. Physicians bitterly attacked compulsory vaccination, medical inspection of schools, compulsory notification of communicable diseases. What is perhaps more significant of the physician's indifference to preventive hygiene is the fact that most of the sanitary movements that have revolutionized hygienic conditions in America owe their inception and their success to laymen, for example, tenement-house reform, anti-child labor and anti-tuberculosis crusades, welfare work in factories, campaigns for safety appliances, movement for a national board of health, prison, almshouse, and insane-asylum reform, schools for mothers, and milk committees. The first hospital for infectious diseases, the first board of health, the first out-of-door sea-air treatment of bone tuberculosis in the United States, were the result of lay initiative.
Dr. Hermann M. Biggs says that in America the greatest need of the medical profession and of health administration is training that will enable physicians and lay inspectors to use their knowledge of preventive hygiene for the removal of living and working conditions that cause preventable sickness. A physician without knowledge of preventive hygiene is simply doing a "general repair" business.
For a few months in 1907 New York City had a highly efficient commissioner of street cleaning, who, in spite of the unanimous protests and appeals of the press, refused to give up the practice of medicine. Hitherto the board of health of that city has been unable to obtain the full time of its physicians because professional standards give greater credit to the retail application of remedies than to the wholesale application of preventives.
Statesmanship as well as professional ability is expected of physicians in the leading European cities, more particularly of those connected with health departments. There it is not felt that a medical degree is of itself a qualification for sanitary or health work. After the professional course, physicians must take courses in preventive hygiene and in health administration. Medical courses include such subjects as vital statistics, duties of medical officers of health, sanitary legislation, state medicine.
The needless cost for one year of "catching" diseases in New York City would endow in perpetuity all the schools and lectureships and journals necessary to teach preventive hygiene in every section of this great country. That city alone sacrifices twenty-eight thousand lives annually to diseases that are officially called preventable. The yearly burial cost of these victims of professional and community neglect is more than a million dollars. When to the doctor bills, wages lost, burial cost of those who die are added the total doctor bills, wages lost, and other expenses of the sick who do not die, we find that one city loses in dollars and cents more every year from communicable diseases than is spent by the whole United States for hospitals and boards of health.
Many diseases and much sickness are preventable that are not communicable. Indigestion due to bad teeth is not itself communicable, but it can be prevented. One's vitality may be sapped by irregular eating or too little sleep; others will not catch the trouble, although too often they imitate the harmful habits. Adenoids and defective vision are preventable, but not contagious. Spinal curvature and flat foot are unnecessary, but others cannot catch them. Preventive hygiene, however, should teach the physician's duty to educate his patient and his community regarding all controllable conditions that injure or promote the health.
In the absence of special attention to preventive medicine new truth is forced to fight its way, sometimes for generations, before it is accepted by the medical profession. So strong are the traditions of that profession and so difficult is it for the unconventional or heterodox individual to retain the confidence of conservative patients, that the forces of honorable medical practice tend to discourage research and invention. The man who discovers a surgical appliance is forced by the ethics of his profession either to commercialize it and lose his professional standing, or to abide the convenience of his colleagues and their learned organizations in testing it. Rather than be branded a quack, charlatan, or crank, the physician keeps silent as to convictions which do not conform to the text-books. Many a life-saving, health-promoting discovery which ought to be taken up and incorporated into general practice from one end of the country to the other, and which should be made a part of the minimum standard of medical practice and medical agreement, must wait twenty-five or fifty years for recognition.
THE DISCIPLE OF FRESH AIR AND HOME INSTRUCTION IS STILL AN OUTCAST IN SCORES OF HOSPITALS
For want of a school of preventive medicine to emphasize universally every new truth, the medical colleges are permitted to remain twenty-five or fifty years behind absolutely demonstrated facts as to medical truth and medical practice. In 1761 a German physician, Avenbruger, after discovering that different sounds revealed diseased tissue, used "chest tapping" in the diagnosis of lung trouble. In 1815 Lëannec discovered that sound from the chest was more distinct through a paper horn. On that principle the modern stethoscope is built. He made an accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis, and while suffering from that disease treated himself as a living clinical study. In 1857 Pasteur proved the presence of germs "without which no putrefaction, no fermentation, no decay of tissue takes place." In 1884 Trudeau started the first out-of-door care of pulmonary tuberculosis in America. In 1892 Biggs secured the compulsory notification of pulmonary tuberculosis. In 1904 began our first out-of-door sea-air treatment for bone tuberculosis. Yet there are thousands of physicians to-day who sincerely believe that they are earning their fees, who, from houses shut up like ovens, give advice to patients for treatment of tuberculosis, who prescribe alcohol and drugs, who diagnose the disease as malaria for fear patients will be scared, who oppose compulsory registration, and who never look for the tuberculous origin of crippled children. Just think of its being possible, in 1908, for a tuberculous young man of thirty to pay five dollars a day to a sanatorium whose chief reliance is six doses of drugs a day!