t blindly follow blind physicians. A family doctor
who gives cod-liver oil for anaemia due to adenoids may do a child as
much harm as a nurse who drugs the baby to make it sleep. The physician
who refuses to tell the board of health when smallpox or typhoid fever
first breaks out takes human life just as truly as if he tore up the
tracks in front of an express train. This is another way of saying that
parents and teachers must fit themselves to know whether the family
physician and their community's physicians are efficient practitioners
and teachers. Every one can learn enough about the preventable causes
of sickness and depleted vitality to insist upon the ounce of education
and prevention that is better than a pound of cure.

For its sins of omission, as for its sins of commission, the medical
profession shares responsibility with laymen. For years leading
educators, business men, hospital directors, public officials, have
known that communicable diseases could be stamped out. The methods have
been demonstrated. There is absolutely no excuse to-day for epidemics
of typhoid in Trenton, Pittsburg, or Scranton, for epidemics of scarlet
fever in the small towns of Minnesota, for uninterrupted epidemics of
tuberculosis everywhere. Had either laymen, physicians, or
school-teachers made proper use of the knowledge that has been in
text-books for a generation, this country would be saving thousands of
lives and millions of dollars every year. Our _doing_ and _getting
done_ have lagged behind our _knowing_.

The failure of physicians to "socialize" or "humanize" their knowledge
is due to two causes: (1) no one has been applying _result tests_ to
the profession as a whole and to the state in its capacity as doctor,
testing carefully the sickness rate, the death rate, and the expense
rate of preventable diseases; (2) physicians themselves have not needed
to know, either at college or in practice, the tax levied upon their
communities by preventable sickness. Public schools can do much to
secure result tests for individual physicians, for the profession as a
whole, and for boards of health. Schooling in preventive medicine, or,
better named, schooling in preventive hygiene, will fit physicians to
do their part in eradicating preventable disease.

Preventive hygiene is not an essential part of the training of American
physicians or nurses to-day. Not only are there no colleges of
preventive hygiene, but medical schools have not