DR. ALLEN’S WORK REVIEWED BY LOUIS NUSBAUM.
Dr. Allen has presented a work which in the directness, forcefulness and logic of its appeal for good health as a civic duty makes the book worthy to be considered as epoch-making. To quote Dr. Allen’s thought, changed conditions of social and industrial life have virtually eliminated from present-day politics the inalienable rights for which our ancestors fought and died, and in their stead has come the need to formulate rules which will insure to every citizen the economic and industrial rights essential to twentieth century happiness. And just as community of interest was the incentive to attaining those political rights in the past, so united action is necessary to secure health rights.
Scarcely any phase of the question of public health is left untouched in this interesting little book. From the consideration of sound teeth as a commercial asset, through the discussion of a long list of preventable and removable diseases and disorders, to the examination of tuberculosis as an industrial loss, Dr. Allen has made out so strong a case against the social losses due to disease, that one is necessarily aroused to a new sense of public duty. And it is in this very awakening of a slumbering public consciousness that the book will do its most effective work. As Prof. William T. Sedgwick says in his introduction, a reading of the chapter headings merely “will cause surprise and rejoicing.”
The facts of the existence of the health conditions revealed in this book are not new, but the immensity of these known conditions, as successively enumerated here, is almost astounding. For a brief moment in reading the book one is led to feel that it is the work of an extremist or enthusiast, to be discounted in effect for a certain measure of high coloring, yet a careful inspection reveals the fact that everything is told in an honest and direct, even if at times dogmatic, way.
Unlike the work of many pseudo-reformers, Dr. Allen’s book is comprehensive in its scope in that it not only reveals existing conditions, but it indicates how these conditions may be remedied and tells of the efforts thus far made to apply the proper remedies. After pointing out that the best index to community health is the physical welfare of school children, Dr. Allen compares the European method ofdoing thingsat school with the American method ofgetting things done.
No brief review can do justice to a work so inspiring that to be instantly effective it needs but to be read widely. It is filled with material that should be particularly at the command of every teacher, if not of every parent, in the land. Its especial interest to teachers of civics lies in its analysis of the relation of public health and its consequent economic conditions to organized government and to the body social.
[“Civics and Health.” By William H. Allen, secretary, Bureau of Municipal Research, with an introduction by William T. Sedgwick, professor of biology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston: Ginn & Co., 1909. Pp. xi-411.]