Sanitation in 1890 : address delivered before the American Public Health Association at the annual meeting held at Charleston, S.C., December 16, 1890 / by Henry B. Baker.

  • Baker, Henry B. (Henry Brooks), 1837-1920.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sanitation in 1890 : address delivered before the American Public Health Association at the annual meeting held at Charleston, S.C., December 16, 1890 / by Henry B. Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    declared that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ai-e among the unalienable rights, to secure which governments are instituted among men. In times past, the minds of men and of governments have been kept so occupied with protecting the lives of their citizens from the dangers caused by the battling of other men, hostile tribes, and foreign govern- ments, that little time or energy has been left to devote to the protection of life and health from ordinary preventable causes of death and sick- ness. Now that men and nations are coming to be less destructive of each other, it is rapidly coming to be seen that by organized effort and general cooperation a great proportion of the premature deaths, and of the sickness from the most common diseases, and the resulting pauper- ism, insanity, and crime, can easily be prevented, and this without any radi- cally new principle of government, but by an extension of the principle of protection of life and property into new systems of effort. The con- stitution gives congress the power to provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States. It is the same now as when the book of Hosea was written—our people are destroyed for lack of knowledge ; ^ and a government has only to collect, search out, and disseminate among its people knowl- edge of the causation of disease, its modes of spread, and how to avoid causes of deaths and the spreading of epidemic diseases, to make it pos- sible for its people to have safety to life and that pursuit of happi- ness which are only possible to persons in health. This implies, how- ever, that the government must constantly maintain statistical investiga- tions and scientific researches into the causation of diseases, and such a complete and thorough system of prompt notification of the outbreak of every dangerous communicable disease within its own country—and also in all parts of the world where it may readily spread to its own country—that the government shall be able to, and shall, in fact, promptly warn all its people endangered, and not only warn them, but shall at the same time place before them the best that is known or can be learned concerning the exact methods for avoiding the dangers to life and health from that particular disease which at the time is threatening. Only by some such modification of governmental methods is it pos- sible to do for a people that service which it is the highest function of a government to perform. We hear much about the wisest statesmanship as applied to such questions as relate to our commercial dealings with other nations—ques- tions whether it is wiser to have free trade, or protection of home industries ; yet these are questions of small consequence to the people of any country when compared with questions which involve the protec- tion of the lives and the health of the people themselves, because the people can get sufficient food and other necessaries for subsistence under free trade or under protection ; but under neglect of proper gov- ernmental protection of life and health a large proportion of the people ^ Hosea, chapter iv, verse 6.