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Updated: May 19, 2025
On a similar occasion, at this rostrum in 1949, I heard a great American President, Harry S. Truman, declare this: "The American people have decided that poverty is just as wasteful and just as unnecessary as preventable disease." Many listened to President Truman that day here in this Chamber, but few understood what was required and did anything about it.
Will he follow meekly and at a safe distance in the wake of the modern movement for economic justice and humane living conditions? Will he allow people to think for a moment that his job is to coddle a few of the elect and to solace a few of the victims of preventable hardship and injustice?
So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall in love with each other comes into this category. But infection of that kind is preventable.
Shall we of these better walks of life pursue our way in smug contentment, and permit the preventable causes of blindness to continue their black business, and ever add to the roll of their victims?"
In the matter of accidents the comparison with Great Britain is not so overwhelmingly unfavourable as is sometimes supposed. If, indeed, we accept the figures given by Mullhall in his "Dictionary of Statistics," we have to admit that the proportion of accidents is five times greater in the United States than in the United Kingdom. The statistics collected by the Railroad Commissioners of Massachusetts, however, reduce this ratio to five to four. The safety of railway travelling differs hugely in different parts of the country. Thus Mr. E.B. Dorsey shows ("English and American Railways Compared") that the average number of miles a passenger can travel in Massachusetts without being killed is 503,568,188, while in the United Kingdom the number is only 172,965,362, leaving a very comfortable margin of over 300,000,000 miles. On the whole, however, it cannot be denied that there are more accidents in American railway travelling than in European, and very many of them from easily preventable causes. The whole spirit of the American continent in such matters is more "casual" than that of Europe; the American is more willing to "chance it;" the patriarchal régime is replaced by the every-man-for-himself-and-devil-take-the-hindmost system. When I hired a horse to ride up a somewhat giddy path to the top of a mountain, I was supplied (without warning) with a young animal that had just arrived from the breeding farm and had never even seen a mountain. Many and curious, when I regained my hotel, were the enquiries as to how he had behaved himself; and it was no thanks to them that I could report that, though rather frisky on the road, he had sobered down in the most sagacious manner when we struck the narrow upward trail. In America the railway passenger has to look out for himself. There is no checking of tickets before starting to obviate the risk of being in the wrong train. There is no porter to carry the traveller's hand-baggage and see him comfortably ensconced in the right carriage. When the train does start, it glides away silently without any warning bell, and it is easy for an inadvertent traveller to be left behind. Even in large and important stations there is often no clear demarcation between the platforms and the permanent way. The whole floor of the station is on one level, and the rails are flush with the spot from which you climb into the car. Overhead bridges or subways are practically unknown; and the arriving passenger has often to cross several lines of rails before reaching shore. The level crossing is, perhaps, inevitable at the present stage of railroad development in the United States, but its annual butcher's bill is so huge that one cannot help feeling it might be better safeguarded. Richard Grant White tells how he said to the station-master at a small wayside station in England,
Here there is a maximum figure of 13 per cent of the energy of the coal put into harness, and the average is less than 10 per cent, even in the larger plants. In one establishment visited by the fuel engineers of this department during the war a preventable waste of 40,000 tons a year was discovered.
What but the thing which is pointed to by plain and terrible fact, as the lesson which God must mean us to learn, if He means us to learn any, from what has so nearly befallen? Let our hearts be bowed as the heart of one man, to say that so far as we have power, so help us God, no man, woman, or child in Britain, be he prince or be he beggar, shall die henceforth of preventable disease.
The development of our knowledge of the nature of infection forms one of the most entertaining chapters in obstetrics, and provides a simple way of showing the genuine need of preventive measures. The evidence they gathered should have left no one doubtful that the disease is contagious, and largely preventable.
Five-sixths of the soldiers whom England lost died from preventable diseases, and the want of proper food, clothing, and shelter. Bullets and cholera and frost-bite did their deadly work unchecked. The officers had at least their full share of the hardships and the fatalities.
That which we have hitherto regarded so lightly as a didactic problem is, on the contrary, a great and veritable social question. When a moral problem is limited to the effects of preventable causes, it is merely apparent.
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