_Both child and adult to be protected from their own
ignorance. Educative value of law and of fines for
disobedience. Compulsory sanitation by municipal, state, and
federal regulations. Instructive inspection._
The strength of the State is the sum of all the effective
people.
_Dr. Edward Jarvis, Massachusetts State Board of Health, 1874._
When the Americans took charge of Bilibid Prison in Manila
the death rate was 238 per 1,000 per year: by improving
sanitary conditions, this death rate was reduced to about 75
per 1,000: here it remained stationary until it was
discovered that a very high percentage of the prisoners were
infected with hookworms and other intestinal parasites: then
a systematic campaign was inaugurated to expel these worms,
and when this was done the death rate fell to 13.5 per 1,000.
_C. W. Stiles._
So the duties and responsibilities of a Health Department
are not only changed, but they are very greatly increased
and are constantly increasing. And on broad lines to cause
the citizen to do the things he can and ought to do, and
then to do for him the things that he cannot do, but which
should be done, is the duty of the State, and that, being
interpreted, means the real prevention of disease.
_Eugene H. Porter, Report, New York State Department of
Health, 1909._
The whole difference of modern scientific research from that
of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense successes,
lies in its collective character, in the fact that every
fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of
relationships explained. In a sense, scientific research is
a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct
that makes men secretive.
_H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old._
Public or governmental hygiene has been chiefly concerned
with pure air and pure food, and with organisms producing
epidemic diseases. Boards of health are a recent invention,
and in this country they have as yet been only imperfectly
developed. They can never become the power they should be
until, first, public opinion better realizes their
usefulness and the fact that their cost to the taxpayer is
saved many times over by the prevention of death and
disease; second, more and better health legislation is
enacted--national, state, and municipal; and, third, special
training is secured for what is really a new profession,
that of a public health officer.
_Report on National Vitality._