Evolution of preventive medicine / by Sir Arthur Newsholme.

  • Newsholme, Arthur, Sir, 1857-1943.
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Evolution of preventive medicine / by Sir Arthur Newsholme. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cleanliness and of personal cleanliness and chastity form an essential part of our subject. Next in order comes the growth of domestic and communal sanita¬ tion; while an account of the increasing realisation of the essential relation of housing to health if developed would occupy all the following pages. A romantic and most important chapter in the history of health is that dealing with health in relation to food and drink, including alcohol. Nor can the influence of air, climate and season on health, recognised by Hippocrates and Sydenham alike, be ignored. The prevention of occupational diseases is gradually assuming its full importance; but space cannot be devoted to its growth in these pages. Any history of preventive medicine must necessarily be concerned largely with the prevention of infection, to which the majority of the diseases of mankind are due; and there is no more interesting study than that of the growth of the idea of contagion, the differentia¬ tion of infections, and the means for immunising mankind against certain infections. The total subject of infections is too large for the present volume; and the intensely interesting growth in recent years of knowledge of the entire subject, as well as of the prevention of such mainly exotic diseases as malaria, yellow fever, ankylostomiasis, etc., must be left for discussion in another volume. In the past preventive medicine has been chiefly concerned with the prevention of disease. It will probably remain thus in the future; and we may, in