Diseases – Report on the conquest of ill health

The reputed Samuel Butler depicted a community in which illness was treated as a crime and the sick sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The conception is satiric, but the satire has a sting of truth in it. We do not yet try a man for having a boil upon his neck, find him guilty of rheumatism, or give him twenty eight days without the option for contracting a cold. But we do increasingly realize that public enemy is ill health, that the depredations made by sickness upon both the private and the public purse are many times greater in a single year than those of burglars and thieves in a generation and that whether or no the love of money is the root of all evil, health is most certainly the seed of the greatest national and individual good. While the old fatalistic attitude that sickness is the will of God has long since been abandoned, science endorse most emphatically the belief that disease is the punishment of sin if by sin is understood that social sin which takes the form of bad housing, bad drains, poor nutrition and lack of adequate fresh air and sunlight. The cost of ill health to the nation is staggeringly high. Ill health is not restricted to anyone class. It is reckoned that two thirds of this sickness is preventable. In a score of different fields, both nationally and locally, measures are being taken first to discover the conditions which affect the health of the individual adversely and secondly to remedy them, or at least to modify them so that the effect on health is less harmful. In industry preventive measures have been widely applied. They include the prevention of accidents. All these are based upon the excellent principle that the cost of injury must be borne by the industry concerned, thus making it to the financial advantage of an employer to reduce accidents to a minimum. As a consequence, safety devices have been installed in works and factories, and regulations enforced to prevent workers from taking risks. Certain occupations, owing to the nature of the goods handled or the processes used, give rise to diseases individual diseases, as they are called which often end in death.