CHAPTER III. 



THE TEACHING OF PHYSIOLOGY AND THE 

 PUBLIC HEALTH. 



No one will question the validity and appropriateness of 

 hygienic considerations in a treatise on physiology. To 

 promote the individual and the general health are the pur- 

 poses assigned to physiology by the law which made it a 

 common school subject. While, of course, there is danger 

 of materially destroying the educational value of physiology 

 by having it degenerate into a dried and cut code of empir- 

 ical formulae, mostly without any real practical value; while 

 the ordinary school often sins by spending valuable time in 

 giving platitudinous advice which it was never the intention 

 to have followed to the letter, there is, on the other hand, 

 the possibility of repaying a thousand-fold the money and 

 time expended in teaching physiology if there could be put 

 into the practical belief of all its students a clear percep- 

 tion of the fundamental laws that govern proper sanitation 

 and of the scientific methods of preventing disease. To 

 be obliged to acknowledge, as true it is, that most of the 

 diseases of the human body are due to agencies which it is 

 entirely possible to control, and even eradicate, by properly 

 directed sanitary and hygienic methods, shows how urgent 

 is the necessity of impressing this information upon the 

 attention of the public at large. 



In a perfectly healthy community, possessed of a per- 

 fect system of sanitation and barring the direct introduction 

 of disease by admitting affected persons from the outside, 

 the infectious and contagious diseases would and could 

 never appear. Diphtheria and scarlet fever would leave 

 children untouched, and consumption and typhoid would 

 disappear from the lists of mortality. It is, however, use- 



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