HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1040, 7 September 1911, Page 4

HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT.

“The healthy individual man needs a healthy community, in order that he may maintain his physiological normals at their highest efficiency. To this proposition, many objections may be made,” says Dr. Mackenzie, medical member of the Scottish Local Government Board : —“Of these objections, I name two —first, the charge that public health movement exalts the environment at the expense of the individual heredity ; second, that this evolves Into a systematic method of reducing the pressure of life, and thereby preserving the unfit. As to heredity, the charge sits lightly upon us. Anyone must allow that the obstructions to healthy development are a vast and contused mass. Until this gross environment is disentangled, split up, and reduced to its least potential, no one can know what the human organism can do. If you give children more light, more air, more food, they will grow into healthier, stronger, more resistant adults than if you keep them in the dark, poison their air, and restrict their food. To anyone that doubts this, I merely say : Try the experiment of transplanting a n infant from a slum to a hospital. Xo go from the lightless, airless, foodless home, to the well-lit, wellaired, well-provided hospital, is to go fiom physiological proverty to physiological wealth. Among the middle classes, one never fails to note the change from pinching to prosperity. The thin, pale man with restless eye, anxious, always thinking backwards, alters into the rosy-cheeked, full-bodied citizen, with head erect, and a smile for all comers. In the less favoured proletariat, the change is no less striking. After a few weeks of light and air and regular food, the human weakling sprouts out and grows both in muscle and in nerve, both in energy and in coordination, both in body and in mind. It is now that new faculties are created ; it is the old faculties ceasing to be clogged up. And the sole change has been a change in environment. Until, therefore, the environment is first made healthy, the question of physiological inheritance does not concern the healthy movement. It is an absurb waste to evolve by selection an inheritable ‘fitness’ against an environment that can itself be swept out of existence. In this country we do not build houses in the tree tops to escape the wolves ; there are no wolves. Neither do we kill thousands in order to evolve a type fitted by heredity to resist plague; we simply keep plague out!”—Exchange.