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While it is denied that acute dilatation can occur in a sound heart, at the latter end of a serious illness the heart is never sound, and acute dilatation can most readily occur, though fortunately it is generally preventable.
One cannot achieve perfect results acting alone, but as the example begins to sink in there will be followers, and thus in the course of time we can hope to put inflated business and its fellow, depressed business, into a class with small-pox that is, into the class of preventable diseases.
Of the twenty children brought to me for inspection during the past three years, fifteen were blind from infant ophthalmia, and, as I myself am a victim of this same disease, I am leaving no stone unturned in my efforts to save other children from hardships and limitations that are wholly preventable, and I feel that I am peculiarly fitted to help in this great work.
Only 3,806 of the whole number were wounded. Even this is not the most striking circumstance. It is more impressive that three-fourths of the sick suffered unnecessarily. Seventy-five per cent. of them suffered from preventable diseases. That is, the naturally sick were 12,563; while the needlessly sick were 36,179. When we look at the deaths from this number, the case appears still more striking.
Though alcoholism did not cause all poverty, it stupefied men's minds so that they permitted much preventable poverty; though it did not cause all immorality, a few drinks often sent a good man to the brothel; and what is more, many of the brothel inmates endured their life largely because of the stupefying use of alcohol. No one knows the evil of alcohol more than the poor housewife.
The question has often been debated in my mind whether death is or is not wholly preventable; whether, if the entire human race were united in their efforts to eliminate causes of decay, death might not also be altogether eliminated.
The disturbed balance of the sexes is a thing that will right itself in one generation. Need of population will be best answered by efforts to salvage the race. The United States loses each year five hundred thousand babies under twelve months of age from preventable causes. An effort to save them would seem more reasonable than a demand for more children to neglect.
Every part of the body feels the ill effect of continued exhaustion. Of the diseases caused by bad habits, it can only be said that all the evils they cause, directly and indirectly, are entirely preventable; that they are usually wrong morally, and that the suffering which results is sure.
It was a dark world; it was full of preventable disorder, preventable diseases, and preventable pain, of harshness and stupid unpremeditated cruelties; but yet, it may be even by virtue of the general darkness, there were moments of a rare and evanescent beauty that seem no longer possible in my experience.
"Depend upon it," said Father Payne, "that anything which makes people acquiesce in preventable evil, and see the beautiful effects of death and pain and waste, is the direct influence of the devil. It is the last and most guileful subtlety that he practises, to make us solemnly mournful and patient in the presence of calamities for which we have ourselves to thank.
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