MOSES THE FOUNDER OF PREVENTIVE BLEDICINE.I . Ting outpouring of books
directly resulting from the recent. world-wide cataclysm is already prodigious, and the flood still rises. Many of them have but an ephemeral interest, while many others are redundant. This cannot be said of this little volume, the outcome evidently of the musings of a Captain in the R.A.M.C. confronted with the many problems of sanita- tion which had to be overcome were even a semblance of health to be maintained in our army in Macedonia. In that campaign • A Lost Love. By Ashford Owen. New Edition. London : John Murray. [Ss. M. net ] t Moses the Founder of Preventive Medicine. By Percival Wood. L.R.C.P., Captain R.A.M.C. London : S.P.C.K. [4s. net.] disease, so successfully overcome on the Western Front, seemed likely to come into its own again, and, if disaster was averted, thanks are due to the almost superhuman efforts of the Sanitary Corps. Pondering these things, Captain Wood bethought him of the plagues of Egypt and the tremendous difficulties of hygiene Moses had to overcome in the exodus from Egypt and the wanderings in the wilderness. He suggests that the observant, far-seeing man, Moses, taught much by Nature in the period following his first flight from Egypt after slaying the two Egyptians, and learning still more from observation of the course of the ten plagues, recognized the importance of a system of hygiene among a people placed as were the Israelites, and took measures to enforce sanitary laws. To a people so ignorant as was the Chosen People the rules of cleanliness could not be explained on purely rational grounds ; hence they were given a religious basis. This does not imply any deception on the part of Moses, for in that great statesman the spiritual and material were so closely interwoven as to be inseparable. Dealing with the ten plagues, the author shows how, given the first plague of contamination of the water, the others would, according to the laws of hygiene, follow in natural sequence. We are not told how the Israelites escaped such widespread disasters afflicting the inhabitants of the land in which they dwelt, but the very fact that they were kept a despised community apart from the Egyptians may have contributed to this immunity, which in any case has probably been exaggerated by the historian.
The remainder of the book is full of interest, and clearly demonstrates the hygienic bearing of the Mosaic ritual, whereby removal, burning, and burying of dead animals, and isolation and cleansing of infected persons outside the camp, were ensured. The author would not claim to have entered very deeply into the subject, but the book was worth writing, for the author has shown no little skill in selecting his quotations and in generally making vivid the familiar fact that the Mosaic code was largely hygienic.
Previous page
