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

4o6 HENRY BAIRD FAVILL
Delivered before the Industrial Committee, Chicago Association of Commerce,
March 12, 191 5.
HEALTH AND ITS
THE
RELATION TO BUSINESS
question of health and its relation to business
constantly receives more attention and is seen to
have more significance. By and large, the variable
quantity in business efficiency represented by the actual
and potential health of industrial masses is tremendous.
Although the ethical motive for promoting Public
Health is not primarily for the sake of business, indirectly
and essentially, public weal and business efficiency are
inseparable.
Public Health activities for the most part concern
themselves with mass conditions. The efforts to establish
and maintain general conditions which shall make possible
the maintenance of individual health are world-wide.
This is not purely altruistic. It arises out of the fact that
just in proportion as the density of population increases,
the difficulty of individual self-protection accordingly is
magnified. The State undertakes to protect those who
are in the nature of the case unable to protect themselves.
As society becomes more complex, this function
becomes broader. The future will see a degree of cognizance
and surveillance over health matters hitherto unapproached.
The question to which we address ourselves to-day is,
however, a question of individual health, which lies quite
outside the territory of State regulation, and yet of course
is inevitably modified by it. In so far as individual conceptions
form and crystallize, they reflect strongly through
public sentiment upon the mass movement. We are vague
in our understanding of the term, health.
Any group of a hundred men, moving along together
in society, will go through a period of reasonable life