56 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
others, have excellent hospitals, almost innumerable, and 
general hospitals are now being established by the Catho- 
lic and other churches in Iowa. Even in towns of but a 
few thousand inhabitants there are private hospitals owned 
by the surgeon in charge. Now, not only students, pro- 
fessors in colleges, clergymen, and various philanthropists, 
are studying sociology, but in Iowa the members of the 
Board of Control of State Institutions, the superintendents, 
and wardens in these institutions, the secretary of city 
charities, and the general secretary of the Y. M. C. A., 
learn by experience that “prevention is better than cure.” 
Co-operation is practiced, and all persons engaged in this 
kind of work are anxious to learn the causes of poverty, 
intemperance, prostitution, crime, suicide, insanity, other 
diseases, and degeneration. In this manner the generous 
public, which has the burden of supporting these various 
institutions, will learn how to prevent misfortune, and how 
to reduce the number of its dependent class to a minimum. 
For an example, the question is often asked, “Is insanity 
increasing in our state?” In order to secure intelligent 
and trustworthy information on this subject, we must turn 
to the hospitals for the insane. In these hospitals careful 
attention is given to statistics. Here this disease is being 
studied in a thorough and scientific manner. Here we can 
learn to what extent the insane are foreign born, or the 
children of foreigners. Also to what extent heredity is 
the cause of this disease, and whether either parent of a 
patient was intemperate, or vicious, or degenerate. Again 
we look to the hospital to inform us to what extent educa- 
tion and religion are factors of producing, or in preventing 
insanity. What occupations were the insane engaged in? 
Are the single or married more likely to become insane? 
Is city life or country life more conducive to insanity? 
Should harmless and incurable insane persons be permitted 
to live at home, or all of them, always be cared for in 
state, in county, or in private institutions? In order to 
make the statistics concerning unfortunates most valuable, 
the enumeration of the population outside of the institu- 
