Health and Social Evolution

Abstract

THIS comprehensive review of the health of the people, and the gradual recognition of public health as an aim of State activity, shows the hand of a master throughout. Beginning with the Middle Ages, which saw the horrors of the Black Death, and also the beginnings of anatomy and physiology, the author goes on to describe the medical and the humanitarian contributions of the eighteenth century, and the effects upon public health of the industrial revolution, political and social reform, and the growth of State intervention in the field of public health as in other fields. The present position of the State medical service in relation to infant and maternal mortality, the health of the school child, the health insurance services, and the international health services is then dealt with. Finally the author asks: What are the gains and the losses in national health ? Some of the gains are obvious, but there are failures and losses also: failure to get ignorant people to recognise quackery, and loss in average fitness through success in saving feeble infants of the type that used to contribute to the infant mortality rate. Here, as the author implies, we come upon a problem which has its moral as well as its medical aspect.

Health and Social Evolution.

(Halley Stewart Lectures, 1930.) By Sir George Newman. Pp. 200. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1931.) 4s. 6d. net.