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106 SUGGESTED ALTERATIONS IN ACT.
a population. It is from this practical point of view
that I have ever estimated the importance of your
functions, and have fixed the obligations of my own
humbler office. Notwithstanding all that medicine
can achieve, to succour the body as it struggles
against actual disease—notwithstanding those resources
of drugs and handicraft, by which the physician
or surgeon opposes death or mitigates pain
in the detailed exercise of his art, all past experience,
and every transaction of our daily practice,
confirm the popular adage that prevention is better
than cure. If this be true in any particular case,
much more is it true in the largest application.
While curative medicine, ministering step by step to
the individual units of a population, can produce
only minute, and (so to speak) molecular changes in
the health of society, Sanitary Law, embodying the
principles of preventive medicine, may ensure to the
aggregate masses of the community prolongation
of life and diminution of suffering: in the working
of some single enactment, it may affect the lives of
generations of men, and may moderate in respect of
millions the sources of orphanage and poverty.
Surely, it is no common epoch in the history of
the metropolis when you are appealing to the Legislature,
on behalf of the Corporation, for the grant
of additional powers towards the accomplishment
of so great a beneficence. To me it has always been
an act of the deepest and most anxious responsibility
to address you; and it would ill have become