334 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tions, its cause would probably have been discovered and its ravages 

 arrested. This probability becomes a certainty if the disease, as has 

 often been asserted, is caused by diet or by residence in certain localities. 



Lacking an authoritative standard of such an apparently simple 

 thing as the human diet leaves the people a prey to any glib-tongued 

 person who has any strictly original views to advance or pet theories 

 to advocate. A certain magazine article which recently ridiculed most 

 modern theories of diet and laid special stress on pork and beans as 

 the ideal dietary of the vigorous and progressive, is a fair sample of 

 the mischievous and pseudo-scientific writing which catches the popular 

 eye and may do untold harm. The people deserve and should have a 

 dietary standard, and there should be some competent and properly- 

 equipped body, like the council on pharmacy and chemistry of the 

 American Medical Association, who will spend the necessary time and 

 trouble to settle the questions, not alone of the physiological diet, but 

 of the proper bodily exercise, of ventilation, heating, bathing, etc., etc., 

 in short of personal hygiene; as well as the problems affecting the 

 public health, the pollution of streams and the extinction of tuber- 

 culosis. 



Furthermore, any new system of therapeutics or any alleged new 

 remedy should be submitted to this body of experts for trial, and ap- 

 proval or condemnation, before it should be possible to advertise it 

 to the public. A variety of methods of treatment are from time to time 

 exploited and no one has the legal right to supervise them or to decide 

 whether, on the one hand, they can do what they are advertised to be 

 able to accomplish or, on the other hand, whether they can be trusted 

 not to harm and injure the people. 



If the government can inspect food, it certainly has a right, and 

 should exercise it, to determine, for example, whether or not any 

 newly-advertised method of treatment is safe and appropriate. The 

 objection may be raised against such a proposition as the foregoing 

 that it would be an interference with the personal liberty of which 

 our country is so justly proud; to which the obvious reply is that it is 

 not suggested that any one who wishes to submit to any special course 

 of treatment for a particular disease should be prevented by law from 

 doing so, but every one has a right to know whether the claims of any 

 newly-advertised remedy can be substantiated. In other words, it is 

 no infringement of personal liberty to force a person who professes 

 to have a new and valuable remedy to prove that it is at least not 

 injurious before he shall be allowed to exploit it. 



In the material world we have studied everything that grows or 

 exists that can be marketed or used for man's sustenance or comfort, 

 to extend his knowledge, beautify his home, or divert his leisure, but 

 man himself in his most necessary functions, to wit, as an animal, 



