=============+============+=========================================== | | Multiply by the number of deaths for each | Estimated | age group to learn the cost in life | Value of | capital to your community in loss of life Age | Human Life | from one or all preventable diseases. -------------+------------+------------------------------------------- 0-5 years | $1,500 | 5-10 " | 2,300 | 10-15 " | 2,500 | 15-20 " | 3,000 | 20-25 " | 5,000 | 25-30 " | 7,500 | 30-35 " | 7,000 | 35-40 " | 6,000 | 40-45 " | 5,500 | 45-50 " | 5,000 | 50-55 " | 4,500 | 55-60 " | 4,500 | 60-65 " | 2,000 | 65-70 " | 1,000 | 70- " | 1,000 | =============+============+=========================================== _Anti-nuisance_ motives do not affect health laws until people with different incomes and different tastes try to live together. In a small town where everybody keeps a cow and a pig, piggeries and stables offend no one; but when the doctor, the preacher, the dressmaker, the lawyer, and the leading merchant stop keeping pigs and cows, they begin to find other people's stables and piggeries offensive. The early laws against throwing garbage, fish heads, household refuse, offal, etc., on the main street were made by kings and princes offended by such practices. The word "nuisance" was coined in days when neighbors lived the same kind of life and were not sensitive to things like house slops, ash piles, etc. The first nuisances were things that neighbors stumbled over or ran into while using the public highway. Next, goats and other animals interfering with safety were described as nuisances, and legal protection against them was worked out. It has never been necessary to change the maxim which originally defined a nuisance: "So use your own property that you will not injure another in the use of his property." The thing that has changed and grown has been society's knowledge of acts and objects that prevent a man from enjoying his own property. To-day the number of things that the law calls nuisances is so great that it takes hundreds of pages to describe them. Stables and outhouses must be set back from the street. Every man must dispose of garbage and drainage on his own property. Stables and privies must be at least a hundred feet from water reservoirs. Factories may not pollute streams that furnish drinking water. Merchants may be punished if they put banana skins in milk cans, or if they fail to scald and cleanse all milk receptacles before returning them to wholesalers. Automobile drivers may be punished for disturbing sleep. Anything that injures my health will be declared a nuisance and abolished, if I can prove that my health is being injured and that I am doing all I can to avoid that injury. No educational work will accomplish more for any