348 HEALTH. 



remaining dirtiest man. Soap and towels from the toes upwards; 

 11 he who would be clean, needs only to wash his feet." Yet the 

 problem grows up street after street, until we find that it is the 

 whole metropolis that is stated. In good faith, there is no such 

 thing as private health ; health is the Saxon for wholeness, and whole- 

 ness is the public health. "YVe shall further illustrate this presently. 



Public health is either an autocrat, or nothing. Independence is 

 its aversion, for it has to trace and cleanse the dependence of man 

 upon his circumstances and his fellows. When it has driven its 

 ploughshare through a foul neighborhood, sown with salt the founda- 

 tions of sin, and carried rivers of water under the new streets, it 

 then knocks at the house-doors, from the worst to the best, and 

 rummages privacy with a curiosity most detestable and proper. It 

 insists that the public fountain shall have a squirt in every room; 

 that the pure air outside shall widen the windows and space the 

 rooms; that the underground kitchen shall be plucked up, and set 

 in the sunshine; that the chimneys shall burn their smoke; and 

 the sewers have their decorum thought of in their beginnings in the 

 chamber. Thus it ordains that the anatomy of the house shall 

 spring by a fibril of propriety from that of the street: and this, by 

 a fibre from that of the town ; and that every one shall know what 

 his neighbor's income of health is, that pretension may die, and the 

 easy manners of a common stock of sanity and consequence arise. 

 Such is public in contradistinction to private health; the latter is 

 the vis medicatrix naturae, which takes stock of the existing health, 

 and sums it up, for life or death, by a balance of figures: the former 

 is the vis medicatrix hominis, which enlarges the stock, and pro- 

 mises to make it all-sufficient. The business of public health is 

 prevention, but that of private health is cure. 



We shall now speak a little more in detail of the exacting nature 

 of this new duty, and for this purpose we shall group the various 

 branches of it upon the bodily organs. Fop it will be evident to 

 the reader of the former Chapters, that our method of considering 

 the world and the society as the procession of the principles of the 

 human frame, offers facilities for the treatment of this question, and 

 throws it into an order parrallel with that of the body itself, (pp. 

 107, 155—157, 165, 229, 230, 289—300.) 



