Essays in medical sociology, Volume 2 (of 2)Blackwell, Elizabeth
Science
Essays in medical sociology, Volume 2 (of 2)
Blackwell, Elizabeth
Prostitution; Sexual ethics; Social medicine
This range is practically unlimited. The collection of all useful
or suggestive facts gathered by genuinely scientific methods from
the enormous accumulations to be found in our Government reports, in
the records of our medical periodic literature, in the observations
of hospitals, societies, cliniques, and private practice, would, if
properly arranged and tabulated, form a most useful branch of such a
centre. If such collection and examination were extended to the records
of other countries, the value as well as labour of the work would be
greatly increased.
The observation of the dietetic and hygienic as well as medical
treatment of disease, including climate, soil, atmospheric conditions,
the distribution of disease, the effect of occupations, prenatal
influences, and later training, are essential.
The action of mineral waters, of compressed and medicated air, the
hydration of tissues, the conversion of vegetable into animal tissue,
the action of the various constituents of the human body as curative
of disease, present necessary subjects of investigation.
A careful judicial inquiry into the claims of specific cures, where
a sufficient case for investigation is presented (as _Echinacea
angustifolia_ in snake-bite, also the Russian bath as preventive of
hydrophobia), would form another valuable department.
In fact, it is impossible to specify the full range of important
subjects which demand the devotion of able and painstaking research,
working upon the careful study of each type of life for the benefit and
improvement of that type.
In no branch of this wide range of inquiry is painful experiment
necessary.
Our homes, our industrial occupations, our legislative enactments,
should all be guided by hygienic knowledge, and its diffusion should be
actively encouraged by the community. Our hospitals and dispensaries
need to promote practical hygiene. Our medical schools should turn the
force of their learning, ability, and great influence to the conversion
of their students into a vast body of sanitary missionaries. If our
thousands of medical graduates turned out every year into practice
could go forth inspired with enthusiasm for health, convinced that the
preservation of health was their especial work, and that all disease
must be regarded as a violation of the laws of health, a violation
which it was their special duty to fight against, a mighty step in the
advancement of medicine would be taken. The impulse to such progress
should come from improved instruction in our medical schools, and in
the management of our hospitals.
We much need also an unprejudiced and exhaustive history of the
progress of biological inquiry since the Middle Ages, with its present
result in therapeutics. Such a history may be expected to confirm the
not unfounded opinion that the most important advances in practical
medicine have been made by methods which are not in any way at variance
with our natural instincts of justice and mercy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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