30 STUDIES IN ADVANCED PHYSIOLOGY. 



less to effect sanitary reforms by the ipse dixit of the 

 law. The efficiency of a law is directly proportional to the 

 number of people who thoroughly believe in its provisions, 

 and 'a widely disseminated knowledge of the conditions of 

 health and disease must precede the statutory enactment of 

 sanitary laws. Our national health must depend upon the 

 education of the masses in this direction, for repeated sys- 

 tematic attempts by some of our cities to force people into 

 cleanliness and virtue by police regulations have proved 

 how fruitless such procedures are in the end. The public 

 at large is too conservative in its modes of thinking, to fully 

 acknowledge the value of these proposed hygienic reforms, 

 for the notion that nearly all disease is due to a violation by 

 us of some sanitary law is too recent to be fairly established 

 in the public mind. The wonderful insight into the nature 

 of contagious diseases and their prevention is almost wholly 

 a product of the present decade. 



HISTORY OF SANITATION. 



But it must not be assumed that the value of sanitary 

 precautions was not appreciated at all in former times, for 

 the injunctions and directions of the Mosaic code were but 

 the attempts of the Jews to tabulate what experience had 

 proved to them to be valuable in preserving their national 

 life. Their regulations with reference to their food, and 

 their treatment of lepers clearly instance this point. The 

 observance of this code is no doubt one of the causes of the 

 persistence of the Jewish nation through historic time, and 

 explained the comparative immunity of the Jews from the 

 epidemics of the Middle Ages. The cruel and hard, but 

 terribly effective code of Lycurgus for the Greeks had not 

 a little to do with the production of the manhood of early 

 Greece, and the abandonment of this code by the later 

 Greeks was one of the elements that contributed to their 

 national decay. 



The Romans also appreciated the value of proper drain- 

 age, and the Cloaca Maxima of Rome stands as a monument 



