Show AS TO OUR HEALTH A communication appears in this mornings morn-ings HCKALD with regard to the healthfulness healthful-ness of our city and the practice or malpractice mal-practice of doctors It is a singular thing that an intelligent community will without complaint spend thousands and thousands of dollars annually annu-ally protecting its pecuniary interests employing em-ploying the best legal talent that can be found at heavy expense and yet give so little attention and object so stringently to the expenditure of a small amount of money for the protection of the health of the people at large It is recognized the world over as an axiomthough in practice prac-tice it is more < Used perhaps than anything any-thing elsethat the greatest economy is in expenditures for the good of the people and that no community sustains any loss so great as the illhealth and death of its breadwinners and wealthcreators Anything Any-thing that tends to the promotion of the general health of the public is a step in uie right direction of economy and I therefore of wealth This being trueand r < it is trueit is no surprise that physicians > express such disgust at the unwillingness 1 of public officials to look after healthful i measures save those that effect themselves immediately and their own I One might reason on this subject and show that the illhealth of one is the ill health of all on the principle and with as I clear force as we con tend that the evil act of a single man works evil for all the children chil-dren of men i But in matters of health where there are taken into considera 1 FO many things to be tion where there is the loss of money because t be-cause of the loss of time Ja regard to the health of the pcopU it is simply grpss negligence neg-ligence on the part of those to whom the general welfare of the community is entrusted en-trusted if they do not do their duty It is gross negligence to avoid the passage or adoption of measures that will force the unclean and filthy to protect not only themselves but those who are clean and striving for the I general health of the community by preserving pre-serving their own The same rule applies to the employment of physicians The people should be protected pro-tected by lawvigorous lawagainst empirics em-pirics and quacks and mountebanks and curealls If wo look through the number of preventable diseasesor diseases which physicians declare are preventable will find that a large proportion of our death is due to causes that might have been avoided The council is composed of men with sufficient suf-ficient intelligence to enable them to recognize recog-nize the forge of this argument and it is not putting the case too strongly when we state that every death which results from preventable diseases will in a measure be laid at the doors of those who had the power but lacked the will to enact and enforce en-force such regulations as would have reduced re-duced te death rate in preventable cases to the minimum Where we have so many conditions favorable to long life and health our death rate is a subject significant and I telling to those who read it clearly |