of the life of the individual and the community. We all know that much of the daily work of the physician goes to charity, that the public health authorities and sanitary officers are but scantily compensated for their arduous and often dangerous labors. There can be no question that as a profession medicine stands at the head in disinterested service; but there is still room for improving the relation between medicine and the public. How can this be done?
Perhaps, next to the education of physicians of the highest standards, the immediate duty of the university medical school is the development through research of preventive medicine and sanitary science and the education of sanitary officers. This, it seems to me, is the best way in which our debt to society can be discharged; for it is the way through which medicine has moved during the past quarter century to its present commanding position; it is, in fact, the way of least resistance for the human race to evade or mitigate the penalty incidental to advancing civilization. Preventive medicine is the application of medical science to the mass as well as to the individual. It attempts to arrest disease before its momentum has carried it beyond the means of help. It is the truly modern as contrasted with the medieval point of view.
Nobody will deny that much has already been done in the development of preventive medicine and sanitary science. It will be claimed, and with justice, that more has been done than the public is willing and prepared to accept and live up to. We know that today municipalities continue to permit the unnecessary sacrifice of lives to epidemic disease, that politics is permitted to disorganize efficient boards of health in large and small communities and to put the best material interests of family and social life into untrained hands. We know that the public continues, in spite of warnings, to consume noxious drugs, widely and boldly advertised in the daily press. These difficulties are very real, but they should not discourage us. The medical profession is in a sense to blame for this condition; for the household remedies and cures of to-day are those of the doctor of a generation ago, and the medical practise of to-day will crop out in the daily life of the next generation. Likewise, the indifference of the physician and health officer of a generation ago is reflected today in the attitude of the mass of the people.
The university medical school has here a great function to perform, for it is the legitimate source of knowledge pertaining to hygiene and sanitation. There are few problems which have not been suggested by contact with disease. Sanitary science is broad and rests upon many foundations, and the means of disseminating its teachings are many, but its origin is in pathology. Without the stimulus of the
