HUMAN LIFE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 43, 11 July 1914, Page 7

HUMAN LIFE.

LAST CENTURY'S INCREASE. AMERICAN DOCTOR'S PROPHECY. Xew York, June, '2B. Addressing the annual convention of the American Medical in Xew Jersey to-day. Dr. Victor Vaughan said that in the last century the, average of human life has increased by fifteen years. "This," he declared, "will be duplicated in the next twenty years if the. facts we now possess are effectively employed. Further benefits of medicine, both curative and preventive, will depend upon scientific investigation which Governments should help to the utmost. Wc boast of our great civilisation, but this is justified only within limits. "The historian of the future will have no difficulty in convincing his readers that those who lived in the twentieth century were only slightly removed from barbarism. He will tell that a school, a saloon, and a house of prostitution nourished in proximity to one another, that the capitalist worked his employees under conditions which "prevented soundness of body, that labor union men dynamited buildings, that while we sent missionaries to convert Moslems and Buddhists, ten thousand murders wwe committed annually in our midst, and that a large percentage of mortality was due to pivventible disease.''