SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH 

 ^Y W. H. Howell 



Henry Adams in his Education complains with some feeling that life 

 in our generation has acquired an acceleration that is disturbing and 

 discouraging. The discoveries of Science that have given mankind such 

 wonderful control over the forces of nature and have added so greatly to 

 the comforts and conveniences of life have increased also its complexity 

 and speed. Most of us who have passed middle life will agree that living 

 in our day is a strenuous affair, that existence is not a placidly flowing 

 stream but a rushing torrent. With our telegraph and wireless and rapid 

 means of locomotion we triumph over time and space, but by the same 

 tokens these forces that we have called into existence have set for us a 

 more exacting standard of performance to which we must conform. 

 A leisurely comfortable pace means failure. 



Adams thinks that this acceleration in living is increasing something 

 after the manner of the velocity of a comet approaching perihelion, and, 

 he seems to suggest that the comet will sweep round the centre of attrac- 

 tion and plunge outward with ever decreasing speed to an aphelion of 

 dark ages and shattered civilization. 



The same idea is expressed in different ways in the writings of others 

 of our contemporaries. Saleeby, for example, in one of his sprightly 

 essays warns his fellow-countrymen that as a nation their mental tempo 

 is too slow — that big strong slow nations like the big strong slow animals 

 of the quaternary period will suffer in competition with swifter, more 

 responsive peoples. 



We must admit the general premise that the pace now is more rapid 

 than in former days and that it tends to increase in accordance with some 

 as yet unknown law of acceleration. We may accept the conclusion that 

 this condition has come upon us as a result of our increase in knowledge 

 and we may even agree that in proportion as our mastery of nature 

 grows the complexities of living must be multiplied. But it will avail 

 us nothing merely to protest like the Preacher that "he that increaseth 

 knowledge increaseth sorrow". If greater knowledge brings greater 

 sorrows it brings also larger opportunities for happiness and usefulness 

 and we should apply our intelligence to minimize the ills and magnify the 

 good. Reflections of this kind suggest themselves whenever one con- 

 siders matters of public health. Civilization has tended constantly to 

 increase the density of population, to change the mode of living from the 



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