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8
THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE.
The definition of health.
The word 'health' implies by derivation a state of haleness or
wholeness as opposed to one of illness. Hence the popular fallacy,
which continues to linger, that health is largely a matter of freedom
from sickness.
When Preventive Medicine entered the field of public health
its primary objective became the abatement of disease insofar as it
appeared preventable. The attack therefore opened upon infectious
diseases, with special reference to those which were notifiable.
Today, our conception of the problem is less static. Preventive
Medicine has become Social Medicine, under which health can no
longer be evaluated in terms of disease, nor can it be achieved by its
elimination. The health we demand for the people is rather a reserve
of fitness in face of all baneful biological influences, of which disease
is only one, and, even so, only in part preventable. In any case,
preventable disease can only be prevented by disentangling its roots,
which include poverty, bad housing, malnutrition, and ignorance.
Moreover, the new fitness must be physical, mental and spiritual: it
must be total and maximal.
To express this ideal, the term Positive Health has recently become
current, conveying as it does the conception of good health progressing
to even better health, with the goal for ever moving ahead of achievement.
Accepted in this dynamic sense it follows that positive health
aspires to become a matter rather for international comparison than
for Local Government statistics.
The available Statistics.
The statistical evidence for the year 1945, in Richmond as
throughout England and Wales, suggests that despite the War the
physical health of the civil population has suffered remarkably little.
Births have replaced deaths with an increasingly easy margin. The
country as a whole has fed better, and certainly more fairly, than at
any other period in English history. The specific infectious diseases,
for reasons partly unknown to us, have remained quiescent, even
failing to thrive under conditions of gross overcrowding: the only
exception would appear to be Sonne Dysentery, but even here the
rise is in part to be explained by better diagnosis.