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108
health insurance, and with the education in hygiene of the people as a
whole. He stresses the fact that "the greatest need of to-day is the
further education of our people, so that they may be able to take full
advantage of the opportunities offered to them. Above all
there must be the cultivation of the public health conscience in the minds
of the people themselves." Without such cultivation the work of the
most vigilant central or local authority will be largely ineffective,
and the newer knowledge of conditions which make for health and disease
remain unknown and unavailable to those who can most profit by it.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of present-day medical opinion
is the recognition of the important part played by general causes of disease.
Attention is being given more and more to nutritional and environmental
factors, which not only play an important part in the maintenance of
the healthy life, but also are within individual and social control. We
cannot afford to neglect the soil which favours the growth of disease and
disorder, mental as well as physical. Education may therefore be
regarded as the cultivation of the soil and the provision of the good seed
of knowledge, and in its work of public health education your Health
Committee has kept both needs clearly before it. A glance through the
syllabus of lectures offered free to all organisations in the Borough will
show the all-round view which is taken of health and disease. We
rccognise that we cannot separate the healthy body from the healthy
mind, nor either of them from its social setting, in the case of any man,
woman or child.
Nothing is more gratifying than the almost pathetic eagerness with
which our audiences welcome what is provided, and in the discussion
and questions which follow each lecture individual difficulties can be
cleared up; appreciation is again and again expressed of help received,
and the fact that so many organisations make a monthly lecture on health
matters a feature of their regular programmes shows that such appreciation
is more than a matter of common courtesy. In the last few months,
for example; out of a large women's meeting a group of young mothers
asked whether they could not have a series of lectures on "The Child,"
since this was naturally a subject in which they were deeply interested.
This was arranged, and thus the work of cultivation goes on in centres
for the unemployed, in meetings of boy scouts, in political, social and
religious gatherings. More and more ground is being won from the
desert of unhappiness and inefficiency which ill-health creates; the
area of the cultivated is growing.