Health and the New Democracy
Battle for Health : a Primer of Social Medicine. By Stephen Taylor. With 13 pictorial charts in colour and 91 photographs. (Nicholson and Watson. 5s.) THIS is a marvellously cheap book. It is for the public rather than for the technical reader, but there are few doctors who would not find the book both entertaining and in many ways informing. The photographic illustrations are of great technical excellence, though some seem a trifle irrelevant—as, for example, the quite charming picture of a churchyard with tombstones, and the caption :
" Golden lads and girls all must, Like chimney sweepers, come to dust."
Also, one may question whether the pictorial charts in colour have any real value, though, of course, they do brighten up the pages with blobs of red and black. On the other hand, there seem to be few faults of omission, and not a single inaccuracy has been detected, at any rate by me. The salient facts about typhoid, smallpox, tuber- culosis, diphtheria, rheumatic heart disease, venereal disease, and about diseases largely confined to infants and children, are given in untechnical language ; the public and sociological point of view, as well as the personal and family one, being reckoned with.
As Dr. Taylor reminds us, the battle for health is not fought only in hospitals and laboratories, and at the bedsides of sick people. It is fought also in Parliament and on the Borough Council, in the factory and the mine, in fields where food is grown, in shops where it is sold, in the school and in the home. When the Government decides to raise the old age pension, when the surveyor condemns insanitary property, the battle is on. When a crooked manufacturer pushes a worthless patent medicine, or a jerry-builder runs up houses unfit for human habitation, the enemy has found fifth columnists to lend him a hand. We are given pages of information as to the nature and causation of tubercular disease, with detailed accounts of the various methods of diagnosis and treatment, preventive and curative, illustrated by tables showing the deaths at all ages in the different classes and in different parts of England, over a long period of years; and facts are brought forward to show that overcrowding, poverty and contaminated milk are the three chief predisposing factors. " They will be defeated, not by doctors, but by public opinion. Parliament, local authorities, architects, engineers, farmers, builders and the indi- vidual citizen -must all play their part."
One reads through this compress of facts and is almost giddy with the galaxy of wisdom of the ages put down in simple words, supple. mented by pictures which might amuse even a child. The book would have carried more weight had it dealt a little more thoroughly with a much smaller number of subjects. When the pictures are Taken out, not more than sixty pages of print remain, But it yet has a value—in these days, a great one—because it is attractive, and people who ought to think about these problems will be tempted to go more fully into the subject. Surprisingly little or nothing is said about the sort of illness from which the great majority of our old and middle-aged people recurrently suffer : backache, the common cold, varieties of so-called influenza, anxiety and insomnia. Dr. Taylor, we are given to understand, " is not a practising doctor in the ordinary sense of the word "; but the blurb is justified in claiming that " the technique of teaching is as much a science as is the discovery of the knowledge taught."
HARRY ROBERTS.
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