Editorial June 6, 1914 Issue

Shifting Sands

Archibald McLellan

Only a few years ago, people were taught to believe that sewer-gas was a dangerous and dreaded foe to the health of mankind. Today a physician who is a professor of epidemiology in a leading Western university, is quoted in the Berkeley (Cal.) Daily Gazette as saying:—

"The methods of health departments have changed materially in the last few years, though they cling to many antiquated practices. These practices are legacies from a time when even health officers believed that sewer-gas was dangerous and that diseases were transmitted through the air. In accordance with this belief, measures for the control of disease formerly dealt with the environment. Our plumbing ordinances require many feet of needless vent-pipe, since these ordinances are based on sewer-gas superstition."

This is simply another proof that the theories of the medical profession are as the shifting sands of the desert, so frequently changing as to be unsafe guides for legislation which would bar every person from seeking to preserve or secure his health by means other than those prescribed by this same medical profession. There never was a time when so much attention was given to the study of disease as at present, nor a time at which the physician was more helpless in the presence of certain diseases than he is today; yet the clamor for legislation which would make doctors of medicine the only legalized healers of disease, is becoming more and more insistent,—a clamor raised not by the people, but by the doctors themselves.

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