Epidemics and Crowd-Diseases [antikvár]

PREFACE This book is based on the instruction I give to professional students at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and will, I hope, be useful to them and to members of the public health services; but it is not a textbook prepared with an eye to an examination syllabus. I have tried to cater for a wider circle of readers than present or future members of the public health services, viz. all educated men and women interested in the communal aspects of health and disease. The demands made on the technical equipment of the reader are slight; at the worst, a student who has not been bred to medicine may find it helpful to turn up in an encyclopaedia or an ordinary textbook the clinical descriptions of the special diseases studied, the signs and symptoms. I think if one has some picture in one's mind of what is happening to the individuals of the group the story becomes more interesting. Educated people who are not "doctors" seem to me what Count Fosco said all Englishmen were, cautious in the wrong place. They are very ready to criticize the treatment of a patient in a particular case, equally ready to accept medical generalizations without criticism. But the opinion of a layman on particular diagnosis or treatment is usually worthless, for the layman has no experience to guide him, no skill in the differentiation of one set of circumstances from another. On the other hand, a man highly skilled in individual diagnosis and treatment may be quite unskilled in generalization. In this branch of medicine the work which no layman can usefully criticize is assumed to have been done before we begin. It is supposed that the people who were ill at Maidstone in 1897 really were suffering from typhoid fever, and that what interests us is how the things assumed to have happened did happen. The discussion of that problem needs logic and common sense, of which the medical profession has no monopoly. A book written, as this has been, at odd moments and dealing, as this does, with many questions of which the writer has but second- or third-hand knowledge must contain many errors. I hope that such experts as do read it may temper justice with mercy in their judgments.