to the value of methods.  Simple and obvious as this is, nobody seems as yet to discount the effect of substituting attention for neglect in drawing conclusions from health statistics.  Everything is put to the credit of the particular method employed, although it may quite possibly be raising the death rate by five per thousand whilst the attention incidental to it is reducing the death rate fifteen per thousand.  The net gain of ten per thousand is credited to the method, and made the excuse for enforcing more of it.

STEALING CREDIT FROM CIVILIZATION

There is yet another way in which specifics which have no merits at all, either direct or incidental, may be brought into high repute by statistics.  For a century past civilization has been cleaning away the conditions which favor bacterial fevers.  Typhus, once rife, has vanished:  plague and cholera have been stopped at our frontiers by a sanitary blockade.  We still have epidemics of smallpox and typhoid; and diphtheria and scarlet fever are endemic in the slums.  Measles, which in my childhood was not regarded as a dangerous disease, has now become so mortal that notices are posted publicly urging parents to take it seriously.  But even in these cases the contrast between the death and recovery rates in the rich districts and in the poor ones has led to the general conviction among experts that bacterial diseases are preventable; and they already are to a large extent prevented.  The dangers of infection and the way to avoid it are better understood than they used to be.  It is barely twenty years since people exposed themselves recklessly to the infection of consumption and pneumonia in the belief that these diseases were not “catching.”  Nowadays the troubles of consumptive patients are greatly increased by the growing disposition to treat them as lepers.  No doubt there is a good deal of ignorant exaggeration and cowardly refusal to face a human and necessary share of the risk.  That has always been the case.  We now know that the medieval horror of leprosy was out of all proportion to the danger of infection, and was accompanied by apparent blindness to the infectiousness of smallpox, which has since been worked up by our disease terrorists into the position formerly held by leprosy.  But the scare of infection, though it sets even doctors talking as if the only really scientific thing to do with a fever patient is to throw him into the nearest ditch and pump carbolic acid on him from a safe distance until he is ready to be cremated on the spot, has led to much greater care and cleanliness.  And the net result has been a series of victories over disease.