The Logan Republican. [volume] (Logan, Utah) 1902-1924, 1912-12-31
DEATH RATE
DUE TO SOCIETY
SO Says Medical Journal In Discuss
ing War Upon Ravases
OF Disease

n DTOdu Ulnueu CleTBylud III Hi
tuberculosis day sermon propoundet
this question and reached a conclu
sion decidedly negative, God does
not Ak the death rate Who does
then7 We all do.
Those theologians aid high death
rates who ignore the demonstrated
facts Of preventable disease and
seek to perpetuate the medieval sup
erstition that infections are the AL.
mighty's merited scourge. Laymen
who flout the scientific proof that tu-
berculosis is durable and can be elm
mated from human experience, or
who disparage a tuberculosis propa-
ganda as of no personal concern to
them, help to cause the death Of a
consumptive every three minutes in
the United States.
Councils and legislatures which
will not appropriate funds sufficient
for the fight which health boards
would wage against the great white
plague are largely responsible for the
death of ten thousand year, twen-
ty-seven deaths every day, in one
city alone. Those who disregard an
tspitting ordinances and the like
help to send the death rate upward.
Housewives whose culinary efforts
produce dyspeptics directly and
drunkards indirectly give far more
impetus to the upward trend OF the
death rate than most Of Us imagine.
Vendors of patent medicines" and
consumption cures who fleece their
victims until the latter have passed
far beyond the incipient stage in
which physicians could have helped
them-such nostrum takers have a
full share of responsibility for the
thousands on thousands of deaths
from tuberculosis throughout the
country. Those who draw profit from
feeding the poor on adutTated food,
riots and spots" and fowls dead in
storage several years back, have a
similar responsibility for a higl |
death rate.
Those who overwork women and |
children in factories have a heavy |
share of responsibility for holding |
the death rate at high level; so al
so do those employers who require
men to work at dangerous trades UNI
der intolerable conditions such as
these which in some trades hold the |
consumption rate above so per cent
House owners who provide dark, in
sanitary, pest ridden tenements have
no little part in increasing the death
rae. Well meaning mothers, who be-
lieye that they are able to bring up .
children in defiance of the new fang
led notions of hygiene spread by ply
sicians and visiting nurses help to
keep the death rate high. Most inn
portant of all, incompetent and care
less doctors swell the death rate.
For these the medical profession is
directly responsible, whether they
are unframed men turned out by low
grade medical schools, or members of
the profession who have failed to
keep up with scientific progress and
who have become incompetent
through inertia and lazlness. All
these, by their carelessness, indiffer-
ence and ignorance, increase the
death rate, which competent and con
scientious physicians, sanitarians and
reformers are fighting to lower.
We have not the right to blame a
cruel deity for deaths which are ac-
tually due to cross, stubborn, ignor-
ance, inhumanity and the refusal to
exercise the common sense which is
also an inspiration from the AL
mighty" A weeping mother told a
famous physician that it had pleased
Providence to take her baby from
!