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

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 297
I refer to this question of the status and function and
recognition of the teacher, not for the gratification of voicing
my own appreciation, but because the theme which I
am about to discuss and all possibility of a practical bearing
to my idea is predicated upon a competent, intelligent, and
progressive pedagogic body.
My belief is that the maintenance of physical wellbeing
or health is fundamentally a moral question. In this
statement I do not mean to reiterate simply the doctrine to
which all subscribe, that we are under moral obligation to
secure and maintain in our children the best possible health.
That is obvious and accepted, and, in a more or less effective
way, strived for.
What I wish to enunciate is, first, that the moral progress
of the race is dependent upon its physical well-being;
second, that an intelligent building and maintaining of
health is a function of character and inseparable from a
healthy morale.
If health were universal and automatic and the social
conditions related thereto better, it would not be so easy to
discern this relationship to race progress. A study of social
conditions as they are, yields the most convincing proof of
the enormous importance of defective health in the causation
of social disease.
It is, of course, to be admitted that industrial conditions
and a variety of inequalities of opportunity and capacity
have much to do with bad health; but it is also true that,
even under the existing laws of society, the health of the
people could be vastly better than it is.
Whatever that relationship may be, analysis of the
situation shows clearly enough that poverty, crime, viciousness,
and inefficiency are preponderatingly due to defective
physical condition.
The bearing of this is co-extensive with human pursuits.
In infancy we have learned the lesson of the "bad"
child; in school we have learned the lesson of the backward