The problem of national health is one of peculiar interest to physiologists, and to the exponents of those experimental branches of medical science which have sprung from the loins of physiology, for it was with them that the new science of medicine of the last fifty years arose, and they ought to be the leaders of the world in this most important of all mundane problems.
It is well worth while to consider our opportunities and responsibilities and raise the question whether our present system and organization are the most suitable for attaining one of the most sublime ambitions that ever appealed to any profession. By definition, our science studies the laws of health and the functions of the healthy body, therefore, it is ours to lead in the quest for health. Is this object best achieved if we confine ourselves to research in our laboratories, and to the teaching of the principles of physiology to medical students, while we leave the community as a whole uninstructed as to the objects of our research and its value to every man, and trust the medical students whom we turn out to communicate, or not communicate as they choose, the results of their training and our research to the world at large?
There is little question that much of the ignorance abroad in the world, and much of the fatuous opposition to our experimental work and research, arise from this aloofness of ours. Here also lies the cause of much of the latent period in the application of acquired knowledge to great sociological problems, and the presence of untold sickness and death which could be easily prevented if only a scientific system of dealing with disease could be evolved.
The position occupied by scientists in medicine at the present day is largely that of schoolmasters to a medical guild, and even at that, one constructed upon lines which have grown antiquated by the progress of medical science. It ought now to become the function of the scientist to remodel the whole system so as to fight disease at its source. The whole situation at the moment calls out for such a movement. On the one hand, there exists a widespread interest on the part of an awakened community in health questions, evidenced by recent legislation dealing with the health of school-children, with the health of the worker, with the sanitary condition of workshops, with the questions of maternity and infant mortality and with the communication of infectious diseases. On the other hand, there is chaos in the medical organization to meet all these new demands, and the ample means recently placed at the command of the nation and of municipal authorities are being largely wasted by overlapping and misdirection for lack of skilled leadership. Surely it is a time when those who have laid the scientific foundations for the new advances should take counsel together, assume some generalship, and show how the combat is to be waged, not as a guerilla warfare, but as an organized and coordinated campaign.
