BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



what is believed to represent the general attitude of the 

 profession. 



It has been deemed necessary to run the risk of wearying 

 the reader with what is, after all, a very brief survey of 

 public health work before attempting to summarize its 

 outlook. 



First, the public health official feels the confidence which 

 is born of very real accomplishment in the past. Most of 

 the great pestilences which formerly menaced mankind 

 have been swept away, so far as civilized countries are 

 concerned. We shall have no more devastating epidemics 

 of bubonic plague, Asiatic cholera, or yellow fever in the 

 United States. These diseases have yielded to science as 

 they never would have yielded to any other attack. Many 

 of the minor epidemic diseases are definitely in process of 

 disappearance. Typhoid fever, for example, has been re- 

 duced by scientific attack within some twenty years in the 

 proportion of from about seven to one. The paradox 

 remains with regard to a number of other diseases that the 

 means of getting rid of them are known, if we only had the 

 means. Their persistence, in other words, is a social and 

 economic, rather than a scientific reproach. To this cate- 

 gory, so far as this country is concerned, belongs malaria, 

 stated on high authority to be the only disease capable of 

 making a geographic area uninhabitable for the human 

 race. 



There remains, however, a long list of disease conditions 

 against which little or no headway has been made. There 

 is at present no answer to the problem of influenza, the last 

 of the great scourges to menace civilized populations. 

 Of the minor epidemics, poliomyelitis and meningitis may 

 be mentioned as examples which are little amenable to 

 public health control. Meningitis is an example of a di- 

 sease whose microbial cause has been known for many 

 years, and offers a refutation of the common dictum that 



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