Conditions are improving, however. There is a dawn of hope for humanity. For good health is being made a fetish. It is becoming a gospel—a gospel preached in schools, newspapers, magazines, churches and theatres. Accurate knowledge concerning sanitation, sexology, food, clothing, exercise, sleeping, resting, and all hygienic measures, is becoming more and more widely disseminated.
Humanity is awakening to the fact that sickness, in a large percentage of cases, is an error—of body and mind. Ignorance of the injurious effects of wrong foods, drinks, habits and methods is gradually being overcome.
Foremost among those engaged in educating the public away from paths of ignorance, and the disastrous consequences of this ignorance, is the medical fraternity. The noblest and most self-sacrificing profession on earth is the one most industriously engaged in sawing the branch between itself and the tree of Financial Gain. The doctor is the philanthropist most impressively employed in killing the geese that lay his golden eggs with one hand, while he cuts his pocket-book’s jugular vein with the other.
For he catches and segregates—constructing prisons for them, if necessary—all cases,—or even suspected cases—of contagious disease,—disease which, if permitted to spread broadcast, would net him a horde of ducats.
He sees to it that no infectious disorders are imported into the country—the spreading of which would give him much practice. He traces every typhoid case to its ultimate dirty barn, or infected water supply, and counts that day well spent whose low declining sun has seen him stamp out a possible typhoid epidemic at its source.
He vaccinates all—willing and unwilling—lest he be kept horribly busy attending a huge army of small-pox patients.
He instructs gluttons, and others, as to the grave dangers of overeating, or of eating the right food at the wrong time.
He teaches mothers to sterilize their babies’ bottles, and thereby keep the bugs of war at bay.
He thunders against exposure, against spitting in or on public places; he has Health Ordinances passed, covering every conceivable method whereby disease might develop.