THE MORAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH. 



141 



THE MORAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF HEALTH. 



Bt J. II. BEIDGES. 



TIIE objects of this society are, I believe, 

 of an extremely practical kind. It wishes 

 to give tbe English people pure air, pure water, 

 wholesome food, and habitable houses. It would 

 give us, if it could, good drains to carry nox- 

 ious refuse from the houses into the street, and 

 it would not empty that drain into a river near 

 the reservoir of a water-company, but would 

 yield its contents to the all-receiving, purifying 

 earth, where the miraculous agencies of vegeta- 

 tion are at hand to turn death into life, foulness 

 into beauty. Finally, it would wage war against 

 the unseen demons of infectious poison, and 

 against the dull, heavy forces of ignorance and 

 prejudice and indifference that help them in their 

 death-dealing work. It would teach a laundress 

 that when her children have scarlet fever she 

 must not kill other people's children by sending 

 back infected linen to their houses. It would 

 also teach some of those other people that, when 

 scarlet fever is in their houses, they must not 

 send infected linen to the laundress, and expose 

 her to the terrible choice of starvation or crime. 

 It would teach the milkman to rinse his cans 

 with pure water, so as to avoid disseminating ty- 

 phoid fever through a hundred houses. It would 

 teach the country squire to see that the milkman 

 and all other tenants of his estate have pure 

 water at their disposal. Finally, it would reit- 

 erate the well-worn lesson that to unvaccinated 

 people small-pox is more terrible than cholera or 

 the plague ; that an anti- vaccination orator is a 

 homicide ; and that a careless vaccinator, letting 

 fall from his lancet some dust of disease or death, 

 and supplying fuel to the agitator, is a homicide 

 no less. 



This being so, I feel that some apology is 

 needful for occupying the time of men and women 

 intent on purposes of immediate practical utility 

 with talk which, as I give fair warning, will seem 

 to many discursive, vague, theoretical, and misty. 

 But I have to say, in the first place, that being 

 occupied with practical work myself of a kind 

 not foreign to the objects of this society — hav- 

 ing something to do, for instance, with the busi- 

 ness of providing hospital accommodation for 

 the chronically sick among the poorest class of 



1 Delivered before the National Health Society', June 

 20, 1ST7. 



London — my own personal experience has not 

 convinced me that work which is called imme- 

 diate and practical involves the shutting out 

 from one's thoughts of deeper and wider consid- 

 erations. It has, indeed, led me to quite the 

 opposite conclusion. Almost every practical re- 

 form, however necessary, however obvious, sug- 

 gests questions of a startling kind ; sometimes 

 leading you to doubt whether or not the remedy 

 may itself be the source of new evils in the fu- 

 ture ; and always inducing thoughtful minds to 

 ask themselves whether the amount of attention 

 given to temporary palliatives may not be exces- 

 sive, and may not be distracting attention from 

 the deeper evils. At least there can be no harm, 

 there can be nothing but good, in now and then 

 mounting to the point of view from which, so far 

 as our poor faculties admit, the problem before 

 us can be looked upon as a whole. 



A whole, I say. For it is no mere play of 

 words to dwell on the primal meanings of the 

 word Health. Wholeness, soundness, entireness. 

 Integrity — the meaning of the Latin word being 

 Untouched — as you would say of a perfectly ripe 

 fruit in which there is no symptom of decay. The 

 essential thought inherent in the word is that in 

 every organism, every living thing, if one part 

 suffers, the others suffer also. This is the dis- 

 tinction between living things and things that are 

 not living. You cut off a piece from a lump of 

 gold or iron ; all that happens is that you have 

 two small lumps instead of one large one — noth- 

 ing else. The weight of the two lumps is equal 

 to that of the one. But in a living thing it is 

 quite otherwise. You prune the roots of a tree, 

 and you alter the relations of leaf and blossom. 

 You irritate a point in the skin of an animal, aud 

 the whole creature is thrown into convulsions. 

 The whole art of medicine is based on the study 

 of these correlations of functions. The first great 

 object of the physician is to find out what is the 

 matter with his patient. He does this by observ- 

 ing symptoms. That is to say, the observation 

 of a change in some part of the body which he 

 can see, leads him to infer a corresponding change 

 in some part of the body which he cannot see. 

 By the state of the pulse he infers the state of the 

 heart and blood-vessels all through the body ; by 

 the state of the tongue, that of a long tract of 



