CHAPTER IV 

 HOW HEALTH DOES ITS WORK 



IN the preceding chapters we have assumed that the relation 

 of health to business is chiefly psychological. Unquestion- 

 ably, however, the deathrate has an economic effect. In 

 fact there is good reason to think that the economic effect is 

 comparable to that of the crops. Let us examine this matter in 

 the United States. From 1870 to 1910 the annual deathrate in 

 the northeastern quarter of the United States averaged not far 

 from eighteen per thousand. Reckoning in terms of the high 

 prices with which the world is now familiar, it seems safe to say 

 that economists are not extravagant when they estimate the value 

 of the average human life at about $5,000. Of course this varies 

 according to age, health, and ability. Nevertheless if we reckon 

 the expense of bringing up children, the amount that people could 

 earn if they lived to a normal old age, the harm done to business 

 by the taking away of individuals of especial ability, the distress, 

 sorrow, and actual incompetence which death causes among sur- 

 vivors, and the expense of hospitals, undertakers, doctors, nurses, 

 insurance companies and the like, it seems probable that $5,000 

 is conservative. For our present argument, however, it makes 

 no difference whether we say half as much or twice as much. 

 Each death, as we have already said, means on an average perhaps 

 ten cases of severe sickness and a hundred minor ailments such 

 as colds, sick headaches, backaches, stomach aches, and so on. 

 Probably the minor ailments number far more than a hundred, 

 for practically no one is free from them. Most people, indeed, 

 have at least ten or twenty days per year with some slight ailment, 



