Civics and Health
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM. :Author: William H. Allen, with an introduction by William 1. Sedgwick. .Boston and New York. Ginn and Company, 1909. Pp. xi -f- 411.
“Civics and Health” is just what the publishers have called it, a “handbook on getting things done.” It is a splendid campaign document. Not the least of its merits is its easy quotability. We shall search through it in vain for any admission that there are two sides to a question, but it is as full of catchwords and battle cries as an egg is of meat. It is more than a book; it is an exhibit, where every chapter is a booth hung with striking placards and pictures displaying in the most convincing manner the conditions which are found to be in need of reform. It would be impossible to find any single volume which can give so much help to those who are already working for the health of the community. Superintendents who are urging their boards to provide for medical inspection will find in it arguments to strengthen their appeal. Societies working for the passage of child labor laws may turn to it for facts and figures to convince their legislatures. Health officers who are asking for the appointment of school nurses to enforce their recommendations may obtain from the book statistics that will justify their demand. Finally, and this is perhaps where the book will do the most good in an inconspicuous way, the grade teacher may learn from it the knack of presenting facts of everyday hygiene more vividly to her class, and by becoming observant herself of the signs of health in her pupils, may train them to habits of greater cleanliness and alertness. The author has organized his material excellently for presentation. The book is divided into five parts:?
Health Rights.
Reading the Index to Health Rights.
Cooperation in Meeting Health Rights.
Official Machinery for Enforcing Health Rights.
V. Alliance of Hygiene, Patriotism, and Religion. Chapter XVII makes clear the difference between merely “doing things” and “getting things done.” Doing things is wasteful at best, while getting things done is simply the most effective and economical way to bring about a hygienic millennium. For instance, “It may take a year to convert a police magistrate whose sympathy for delinquent parents and truant children is an active promoter of disorder, but a magistrate convinced, efficient, and interested is worth a hundred volunteer visitors. To get things done in this way for a hundred thousand children costs less in time and money than to do the necessary things for one thousand children.”
The opening chapter on “Health a Civic Obligation” is one of the best, if it be possible to choose the best chapter in a book whose standard throughout is high. The last chapter is probably the poorest. When Dr Allen quotes the dictum of Agassiz, “A natural law is as sacred as a moral principle,” and brings in patriotism as a motive for cleanliness, he carries the reader back to the still recent period when no advertisement, whether of “ships, or shoes, or sealing wax,” was considered complete without a picture of the American flag, and when no public gathering could be adjourned without first singing the “Star Spangled Banner.”
The chapter on “Dental Sanitation” is particularly valuable because so little that is really trustworthy has previously been written on the subject. Here as elsewhere Dr Allen goes straight to the root of the matter. He finds the reason for the social inferiority of the dentist as compared with the physician to lie in the former’s lack of public spirit. He says, “The fact that it took the medical profession centuries to begin to feel responsibility for community health is no reason why the social sense of the dentist should be dormant for centuries or decades.” … “Of fourteen dental journals in America, only one has the advancement of dental science as its first reason for existence. Thirteen are trade journals.” He advocates the establishing of free dental clinics as a means of educating the public to take care of their teeth, and at the same time of educating the dentists themselves to a more dignified and less commercial attitude toward their profession. In the very strength of the book lies a weakness. Those who are in the thick of the social fight will exult in the crashing blows of their champion’s sword upon the armor of the conservatives, but the casual reader who wishes to maintain a dispassionate judgment upon the questions at issue, may perhaps be antagonized by the vehemence of Dr. Allen’s demonstration. A. T.
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