Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE TEACHING OF PHYSIOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH. No one will question the validity and appropriateness of hygienic considerations in a treatise on physiology. To promote the individual and the general health are the purposes assigned to physiology by the law which made it a common school subject. While, of course, there is danger of materially destroying the educational value of physiology by having it degenerate into a dried and cut code of empirical formulae, mostly without any real practical value; while the ordinary school often sins by spending valuable time in giving platitudinous advice which it was never the intention to have followed to the letter, there is, on the other hand, the possibility of repaying a thousand-fold the money and time expended in teaching physiology if there could be put into the practical belief of all its students a clear perception of the fundamental laws that govern proper sanitation and of the scientific methods of preventing disease. To be obliged to acknowledge, as true it is, that most of the diseases of the human body are due to agencies which it is entirely possible to control, and even eradicate, by properly directed sanitary and hygienic methods, shows how urgent is the necessity of impressing this information upon the attention of the public at large. In a perfectly healthy community, possessed of a perfect system of sanitation and barring the direct introduction of disease by admitting affected persons from the outside, the infectious and contagious diseases would and could never appear. Diphtheria and scarlet fever would leave children untouched, and consumption and typhoid would disappear from the lists of mortality. It is, however, useless to effect sanitary reforms by the ipse dixit of the law. The efficiency o...