by Jacob Sullum

About the author: Jacob Sullum is the senior editor of Reason, a monthly libertarian magazine.

In the introduction to the first major American book on public health, U.S. Army surgeon John S. Billings explained the field’s concerns: “Whatever can cause, or help to cause, discomfort, pain, sickness, death, vice, or crime—and whatever has a tendency to avert, destroy, or diminish such causes—are matters of interest to the sanitarian; and the powers of science and the arts, great as they are, are taxed to the uttermost to afford even an approximate solution to the problems with which he is concerned.”

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Despite this ambitious mandate—and the book’s impressive length (nearly 1,500 pages in two volumes)—A Treatise on Hygiene...