The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913Osler, William, Sir
History
The Evolution of Modern Medicine: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman Foundation in April, 1913
Osler, William, Sir
Medicine -- History
One disease has still a special claim upon the public in this country.
Some fourteen or fifteen years ago, in an address on the problem of
typhoid fever in the United States, I contended that the question was
no longer in the hands of the profession. In season and out of season
we had preached salvation from it in volumes which fill state reports,
public health journals and the medical periodicals. Though much has been
done, typhoid fever remains a question of grave national concern. You
lost in this state(7a) in 1911 from typhoid fever 154 lives, every one
sacrificed needlessly, every one a victim of neglect and incapacity.
Between 1200 and 1500 persons had a slow, lingering illness. A nation of
contradictions and paradoxes--a clean people, by whom personal hygiene
is carefully cultivated, but it has displayed in matters of public
sanitation a carelessness simply criminal: a sensible people, among whom
education is more widely diffused than in any other country, supinely
acquiesces in conditions often shameful beyond expression. The solution
of the problem is not very difficult. What has been done elsewhere can
be done here. It is not so much in the cities, though here too the death
rate is still high, but in the smaller towns and rural districts, in
many of which the sanitary conditions are still those of the Middle
Ages. How Galen would have turned up his nose with contempt at the
water supply of the capital of the Dominion of Canada, scourged so
disgracefully by typhoid fever of late! There is no question that the
public is awakening, but many State Boards of Health need more efficient
organization, and larger appropriations. Others are models, and it is
not for lack of example that many lag behind. The health officers should
have special training in sanitary science and special courses leading to
diplomas in public health should be given in the medical schools. Were
the health of the people made a question of public and not of party
policy, only a skilled expert could possibly be appointed as a public
health officer, not, as is now so often the case, the man with the
political pull.
(7a) Connecticut.
It is a long and tragic story in the annals of this country. That
distinguished man, the first professor of physic in this University
in the early years of last century, Dr. Nathan Smith, in that notable
monograph on "Typhus Fever" (1824), tells how the disease had followed
him in his various migrations, from 1787, when he began to practice, all
through his career, and could he return this year, in some hundred and
forty or one hundred and fifty families of the state he would find
the same miserable tragedy which he had witnessed so often in the
same heedless sacrifice of the young on the altar of ignorance and
incapacity.
TUBERCULOSIS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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