To establish an independent health service : speech of Hon. John D. Works ... in the Senate of the United States, Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, 1912.

  • Works, John D. (John Downey), 1847-1928.
Date:
1912
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: To establish an independent health service : speech of Hon. John D. Works ... in the Senate of the United States, Monday and Tuesday, April 29 and 30, 1912. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    for the consideration of the Senate an editorial in the San Francisco Star of February 12, 1912: A WORD FOR THE MICROBES. Here are recent words of Mayor Rolph that are commended to your consideration : I think you should go slow about the methods of eradicating tuberculosis. I hear so many mothers in the mission say that this tuberculosis scare has been so driven into the minds of their children that they come home saying they are filled with aches and pains, and have backaches and stomach aches and one thing and another. I heard this discussed last night, and that germs of every human ill have been shown on magic-lantern slides—pictures that make children get the idea that their bodies are covered with germs. I do think that you ought to be very careful to first study out well the effect of all this and prevent what is evidently intended to make children think they are filled with all kinds of diseases, when you know, as a matter of fact, they are not, and that what you are really trying to do is only to prevent disease. Amen. Also hallelujah and God save us. The mayor is right. A child may be scared into sickness as well as safeguarded against it. We have overworked the microbes, poor things. They are good, bad, and indifferent, but no matter how irreproachable their character our chil- dren have been indirectly inoculated with the idea that they should be regarded as malefactors and goblins. The fact is that man has slowly educated himself up to the point where he is scared to death by death. This is why 10,000 fads of healing bud and blossom in our midst. I remember very well when a stomach ache was cured by Jamaica ginger and a mustard plaster. Now the chances are that nothing but removing the vermiform appendix will do the business ; after that, if one has a stomach ache he may try the old remedies. Again, the mayor is right. We show our kids pictures in which human flesh is portrayed as the grazing ground of all sorts of apparent antediluvian monsters. What wonder if the half-formed minds of the children get the idea that there is not much hope for them ; if they are filled with aches and pains and have backaches and stomach aches? Deuce take it! how can they expect anything else with megatheriums and other bacilli at work? The Ohio State Journal in its issue of November 27, 1911, contained this sensible editorial on this subject: THINKING HEALTH. We find this very suggestive paragraph in a book entitled Phil- osophy of Self-Help : The most prevalent and the most dangerous of all forms of infec- tion is mental. It is far easier to get bacteria out of the body than to eradicate disease germs from the mind once they get in. Thinking and talking about disease prepare the mental soil for its reception. Fear and expectancy promote its growth. We apply this thought to medical inspection of schools, which tends to fill the minds of the children with thoughts of disease. It is en- tirely uneducational to do so. It is the easiest thing in the world to transfer an ailment of the body into a disease of the mind, and when that becomes a child's condition, he goes through the schools carrying a heavy load. And that condition of the mind tends to promote disease. One disturbs the free activity of the mind by turning it in on physical ills. The besc hope of health is to think health, and that suggests the sort of education a child is entitled to. It will be a hard matter for even a well child to grow grand and good out of a consciousness of surround- ing physical ills. Mr. President, the doctors are using every means possible to get themselves into the schools. They are trying to teach un- thinking people that this is necessary to the public health. What a dreadful mistake! The presence of the doctor who thinks nothing and talks nothing but disease, is full of fear of microbes and the thousands of causes of disease that had better never have been known, is little better than a death's head in 41917—10969