In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man
or a woman who openly doubted the fundamental principles
upon which his Protestant or Catholic religion had been
founded, was considered a more terrible menace than a typhoid
carrier. Typhoid fever might (very likely would) destroy the
body. But heresy, according to them, would positively destroy
the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all good and
logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of the
established order of things and those who failed to do so were
as culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the
nearest doctor when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are
suffering from cholera or small-pox.
In the years to come you will hear a great deal about
preventive medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our
doctors do not wait until their patients are sick, then step
forward and cure them. On the contrary, they study the patient
and the conditions under which he lives when he (the patient)
is perfectly well and they remove every possible cause of illness
by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching him what to eat and what
to avoid, and by giving him a few simple ideas of personal
hygiene. They go even further than that, and these good
doctors enter the schools and teach the children how to use
tooth-brushes and how to avoid catching colds.
Pages:
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288