Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 275
maintain that individual conviction and a sense of personal
obligation is absolutely necessary to the mobilizing of
aggregate interest. It is, therefore, upon that foundation
that I am about to undertake to awaken in you a sense of
the importance of the subject which I present. Before I get
through you will have said to yourselves, ' ' What can we do
about a matter, as to the facts of which we know nothing,
with which we are not in touch, and which is not a matter
of personal interest?"
I call your attention to the fact that those things are
true at the outset of all the great movements which are
finally dependent upon public sentiment for their prosecution.
The fact that your management here to-day has
established so large a department devoted to the discussion
of Mental Hygiene, shows that those who are thinking about
the subject are planning to mold public sentiment, and so
far as my effort to-day is concerned, I am here for presenting
briefly and in a fragmentary way the point of view of a newly
created National Committee upon Mental Hygiene.
Before I finish I shall have reached the conclusion that
the solution of this whole matter would be simple if we
could only establish what we are in the habit of calling
"right living." But, I call your attention to the fact that
the affairs of this world, the development of social movements,
the arrangement of social matters, the prosecution
of social reforms, does not move from such a broad generalization
toward particular dispositions.
The progress of
things is the reverse. Things move from the particular
to the general.
Improved sanitation, for example, is
the war cry of the
health authorities all over the world. Yet it reaches its
results by taking up, one after another, concrete subjects of
importance and solving them in the light of sanitar>^ laws.
One crusade effectively carried on against typhoid fever
will do far more than years of precept on the subject of
sanitation.