HOW HEALTH DOES ITS WORK 63 



quarter of the United States as a whole the maximum variation 

 appears to have been about 30 per cent. According to the 

 present scale of population this would mean a difference of three 

 billion dollars between the best year and the worst. The labor 

 supply of the country increases or diminishes because of this 

 variation. Remember that we are dealing not only with the actual 

 losses through death, but with the days when men stay at home 

 because their wives are sick, their babies are dying, or they are 

 called to the bedside of their feeble parents. Remember that the 

 loss in efficiency includes also the anaemic work done by men and 

 women with bad colds, with indigestion, and with sick headaches, 

 and also the mistakes made by people with shaky nerves. Think 

 of the stock spoiled, the letters missent, the men wrongly dis- 

 charged, the bad bargains, and the friction and misunderstanding 

 due to these many causes. The sum total is enormous. Remember, 

 too, that all these losses increase in the same ratio as the death- 

 rate. Can there be any question that when the general health is 

 bad, the country pays a huge tax which would be unnecessary if 

 people's health were good.^ 



We rightly make much of variations in the crops from year to 

 year, but why make so much more of the vegetable crop than of 

 the human crop? Expressed in dollars and cents the human losses 

 of a year of bad health are of the same order as the material 

 losses due to bad crops. There is no sense in carefully watching 

 one and neglecting the other. On a purely economic basis the 

 business men of the country ought to pay as much attention to 

 the deathrate as to th'e crop reports. Yet how much space do 

 the two receive relatively in our papers .^^ How much do our cities 

 spend for the conservation of health? Is it not ridiculous that 

 in the year 1916 the 213 cities in the United States having a 

 population of over 30,000 spent only $14,000,000 on the con- 

 servation of health, while they spent $67,000,000 on the police 

 department and $53,000,000 on the fire department? Those 

 same cities spent as much on hospitals as on the conservation of 



