85 
The subject of thought stimulation is intimately connected with the 
subject of the Air of Places, a subject on which Hippocrates wrote 2,500 years 
ago, but that was long before the days of bacteriology. The old chemical 
standard for purity of the air was based on the amount of carbonic acid gas. 
From the standpoint of coniosis it is the amount of infection in the air that 
counts. Need I again refer to the role of the tobacco chewer and spitter and 
smoker? 
PLANTS AND MAN. 1910. This was a paper made up largely of 
analogies, tracing living conditions between plants and their “‘ills and dis- 
eases’’ and of man and his ills and diseases, and the need of clean air, need 
of placing a man under good surroundings. 
Today we hear much of eugenics, of the influence of heredity. It is 
a very important subject. But still more important is euthenies, the 
influence of environment, because we have little control over heredity but 
we have a far reaching influence over our environment. If a man does 
not feel well, is ill at ease under a given environment, he should change it; 
instead of getting drugs, or advice about the use of drugs, he should under- 
stand the situation so he can Do Something rather than Take Something. 
But because people are unwilling to pay a doctor for his time but are willing 
to pay for his medicine, you readily see the result. The less a physician tells 
his community about unsanitary conditions, the smoother his sailing, and 
the better for his purse. (Naturally when a physician offends and antagon- 
izes chewers and spitters they stay away, ditto the man who smokes and 
drinks; when they do apply they may be so far advanced in actual disease 
that the student of ill health can do little for them, he may have in mind 
the opinion or verdict of the mechanical engineer: Not worth while, consign 
to the scrap heap; but he does not say that aloud.) 
Where the medical man keeps still and says nothing, the newspaper 
reporter is apt to run wild. From simple statements “The health of the 
city is good,” there soon appear claims, at a time when there are few cases of 
“contagious disease’ and few deaths, of ‘The healthiest city in the State.” 
At the’same time a city may be ‘‘full of ill health,’ of people who complain, 
who are neither actually sick and yet are not at all well. The newspaper 
itself may be full of patent medicine ads, for ills that are indicators of un- 
sanitary city Gonditions. Patent medicine men are shrewd, they advertise 
only where there is a demand for their wares, for their nostrums. 
To the physician and especially to the student of prevalent ill health there 
