40 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 



It is necessary that measures of prevention be as general and 

 extensive as are the evils which they are intended to check. They 

 must cover the whole community. We have all of us who have come 

 to this conclusion, reached it somewhat slowly and reluctantly, for, 

 in our first steps towards it, it seemed to involve an unpleasant in- 

 terference with personal liberty and personal convenience. An 

 Englishman's house is his castle, it was insisted, and a health officer 

 would make short work of our castle theory. We had to adopt the 

 health officer however, with all his intrusiveness, to saveus from a worse 

 visitor, and we are by degrees getting more and more persuaded that, 

 after all, he is the less of two evils, of which we have the choice. His 

 watchful aid is constantly needed within our houses as well as with- 

 out and around them. It is astonishing how people often become 

 familiarized with, almost attached to, filth of their own gathering, and 

 live amongst it, and breathe its products, without feeling of offence 

 or suspicion of evil. Such people are a destructive nuisance over 

 a pretty extensive circle, of which they are the important but disa- 

 greeble centre, as may be witnessed in certain villages where every 

 man does what is right in his own eyes, and but for a public health 

 officer such centres would be numerous enough in every large town, 

 to almost decimate its inhabitants every now and then. 



Whether the germ theory of disease be right or wrong, whether 

 germs be the product or cause of the changed conditions of the 

 ancient system which we call disease, there can be no doubt of the 

 necessity, with a view to preventing some of the most unmanageable 

 diseases which assail us from time to time, as diphtheria, scarlatina, 

 measles, typhoid fever, that we see to it that our own and our neighbors' 

 surroundings are dry, and that they have not in or about them any of 

 what most men call filth, but a few call material out of place ; and 

 farther, we may remember that having seen to those things, we have 

 not been removing disease, but a nest of disease ; that our own 

 bodies are nests where such disease can thrive very well also, and 

 therefore we must be careful not to put our own bodies in the way 

 of affording shelter to passing germs of an obscene brood, in other 

 words, we cannot use too great caution in approaching places where 

 infectious diseases prevail. We have also to attend to personal 

 cleanliness ; the disease producing organisms are quite large enough 

 apparently to be washed away, and on the other hand, small enough 



