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

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 303
in a measure by mental effort.
It is true that the results of
physical disability can be mitigated by spiritual equilibrium;
but, taken by and large, mental activities pay tribute
to physical condition, and physical aberrations dominate,
deteriorate, and destroy as inexorably as do other physical
and chemical forces which control the course of the world.
It is small wonder that those who have seen and appreciated
the maladjustment of life, in which mental and
moral instability play such a part and permit such havoc,
should strike at this point as the root of social disease.
While estimating these factors at their full and true
value, those who know this subject most deeply know that
there is a territory in which actual and demonstrable forces
play, unconquerable by will,
uninfluenced by thought, acting
and reacting with perfect relation of cause to effect,
which are the product and logical sequence of conditions
antecedent and more or less avoidable.
The educated medical mind knows this.
To a distressing
degree it does not know what to do about it. Much of
the physical perversion which we call disease is terminal
and fixed. Naturally, then, the medical mind seeks the
sources of disturbances, strives to detect the earliest departure
from the normal, and reaches the conclusion that
the effective effort of the race must rest in maintaining the
normal.
If this were susceptible of mass control, and if we could
determine and define the canons of health, adherence to
which would insure the health of all the people, the problem
would be comparatively simple. To determine the facts
would be the first step. To establish the authority necessary
to universal observance would be the second step. So
far as I know, neither of these steps has been suggested
as possible by any careful mind.
The detailed facts of hygiene, though susceptive of some
generalization, are essentially individual, and an individual's
study of his equation is the important need.