THE OUTLOOK OF PUBLIC HEALTH WORK 



maximum effort. Every health official can furnish, at a 

 moment's notice, a list of additional health activities 

 beyond those in which he is engaged, upon w^hich he could 

 guarantee a more than 100 per cent return in service, if 

 only the funds were forthcoming for carrying them out. 



This condition in counties, cities, and states extends also 

 to the Federal Government. The provisions for health 

 activities on the part of the Public Health Service have 

 never approached those made for other useful but no more 

 necessary activities of government. 



This leads up to the pronouncement of an outlook which, 

 it may be taken for granted, is shared by students and 

 practitioners of public health work everywhere. Health 

 is the birthright of every citizen. In so far as he has been de- 

 prived of health by the neglect of his community and his 

 government to provide public health service (as dis- 

 tinguished from purely medical service) he has been cheated 

 of his birthright. No one questions the right of every 

 child to an education and to the protection of the law. 

 Relatively few, however, have visualized the importance 

 of starting out in life with healthy bodies and minds, and 

 the responsibility of civilization in securing them for 

 every citizen, in so far as may be possible. 



It has already been stated that the conception of the 

 scope of public health work has constantly been extended. 

 At first, people were concerned chiefly with dangers which 

 presumably threatened them at the borders of their do- 

 mains — strange terrifying scourges which must be kept out 

 at all hazards. We still quarantine against smallpox and 

 typhus fever from Europe, and properly so, although we 

 have much more indigenous smallpox among us than do 

 many of the countries against which we quarantine, and 

 in spite of the fact that we have an apparently ail-American 

 brand of typhus fever at home which nobody gets excited 

 about for long. But interest in our home-made disease 



[261] 



