670 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by results, the expense of nurses and medicines, and, above all, the 

 permanent impairment of the health and shortening of life which 

 thereby ensue, are fruitful sources of the worst misery and the deepest 

 indigence. These conditions become, in turn, the great nurseries for 

 crime, and for filling our poor-houses, asylums, hospitals, and peniten- 

 tiaries. During the years when an epidemic scourges a city, its busi- 

 ness becomes for the time paralyzed, and a serious check is put upon 

 its growth and prosperity. 



But, more than these, sickness throughout the United States sup- 

 ports in comparative affluence, at least, 75,000 persons with their fam- 

 ilies. The physicians and dentists amount in round numbers, accord- 

 ing to the last census, to 55,000, and the druggists, pharmaceutists, 

 and patent-medicine venders, to about 20,000 more. Add to all this 

 the munificent charities maintained for those who are directly or indi- 

 rectly sufferers from the effects of preventable diseases, such as the 

 deaf, the blind, the insane, and the imbecile asylums, and the aggre- 

 gate outlay for avoidable evils assumes enormous proportions. 



In reference to health and sickness, the civilization of the nine- 

 teenth century presents this remarkable spectacle : millions of dollars 

 annually spent, indescribable torments and anguish endured from an 

 evil which it is possible, but never seriously attempted, to remove. 

 The dark shadow of a barbarous ignorance yet overspreads the popu- 

 lar mind, that sickness is somehow produced by evil causes, whose 

 dreadful attacks we may patiently watch and fight with drugs, but 

 whose ultimate destruction belongs alone to the gods. The danger of 

 an attack by some dreadful disease is yet looked upon with a feeling 

 akin to superstition, not with the calm confidence of security which a 

 thorough knowledge of cause and effect alone can bestow. Slowly, oh, 

 how slowly ! does the human mind awaken to the truth that in this, as 

 in every thing else pertaining to the natural world, nothing happens 

 by chance, nothing of arbitrary will, but all is subject to immutable 

 law. This truth once fully recognized and acted upon, man would ex- 

 hibit the same power and success in subduing in his own body the 

 one great obstacle to his weal, as he has shown in subduing the ob- 

 stacles to his weal in the external world, and he will then become the 

 most healthy instead of the most sickly of beings. 



The proper means for accelerating such a hygienic reformation 

 consists in making it possible for all to become experts in the applica- 

 tion of the science of life. In effecting this, the State has the two great 

 requisites in its own hands : first, to educate and train the youth of 

 our country so that they may realize the importance, and be enabled 

 to apply, sanitary science for themselves ; and, second, to make it pos- 

 sible, wherever there is a dense population, for every one to carry the 

 laws of hygiene into effect, and to protect the people against those 

 who have disregarded its injunctions, and so have become focii for 

 multiplying and disseminating the seeds of infectious diseases. 



