Eradication

“ In such a case, every real man and every real woman in the country would be doing something to insure the defeat of that invading army. Yet such an army is like a box of tin soldiers compared with armies that threaten us all the time, but which cause scarcely an extra beat of the nation’s pulse. I refer to the armies of disease. The army of bubonic plague alone, if permitted to effect a foothold on our shores, might at any time ravage our cities as it once ravaged the cities of Europe and Asia, leaving scarcely enough living to bury the dead. ”

“ In many campaigns of the past, disease has slain its thousands where bullets and shells have killed hundreds, and even the twentieth century with its marvelous science of sanitation has not defeated the direful common enemies of allies and foes. Why disease should attack masses of men in the prime of life, living in the open air, and on the whole well fed and clothed, at first sight seems strange, but when we remember that modern fighting begets an intolerable thirst, which the soldier is naturally tempted to slake as best he can and when he can, at least one reason is not hard to find. ”

“ At every step is war, and this is enough: soldiers black with powder; bayonets bent with the violence of the encounter; the earth ploughed with cannon-shot; trees torn and mutilated; the dead and dying; wounds and agony; fields covered with broken carriages, outstretched horses, and mangled bodies; while disease, sad attendant on military suffering, sweeps thousands from the great hospitals, and the multitude of amputated limbs, which there is no time to destroy, accumulate in bloody heaps, filling the air with corruption. ”

“ This involves, of course, the exclusion of the evil, that is, of suppressing the causes that produce disease, as well as in cultivating the resistant power of the human system. In sanitation, diet, and exercise are the great fields of medical enterprise and advance. I need not say that the physician who, in the case of those under his charge, or who may possibly require his aid, contents himself with waiting for developed disease, is like the soldier in a besieged city who opens the gates and then attempts to repel the invader who has effected a lodgment. ”

“ Can we not resist this contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be—whether moral epidemic or cosmic force? Do we not fight against the plague, and strive even to repair the disaster caused by an earthquake? ”

“ I said, “our risk is common; our precautions and exertions shall be common also. If manly courage and resistance can save us, we will be saved. We will fight the enemy to the last. Plague shall not find us a ready prey; we will dispute every inch of ground; and, by methodical and inflexible laws, pile invincible barriers to the progress of our foe. Perhaps in no part of the world has she met with so systematic and determined an opposition. Perhaps no country is naturally so well protected against our invader; nor has nature anywhere been so well assisted by the hand of man. ”

“ If, under all the agencies of cure and reform which have been in active operation during the past fifty years, no impression has been made upon this great evil which is so cursing the people, then is the case indeed desperate, if not hopeless. But if it appears that, under these varied agencies, there has been an arrest of the disease here, a limitation of its aggressive force there, its almost entire extirpation in certain cases, and a better public sentiment everywhere; then, indeed, may we take heart and say "God speed temperance work!" ”

“ For as in the body disease arises from the loss of the physical unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the form of warfare or discord between the various parts, or of the abnormal development of individual organs, or the consumption of the system by predatory germs and growths; so in our modern life we find the unity gone which constitutes true society, and in its place warfare of classes and individuals, abnormal development of some to the detriment of others, and consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites. ”

“ Moreover, and this is one of the most fearful problems with which modern civilisation has to deal—we interfere with natural selection by our conscientious care of life, as surely as does war itself. If war kills the most fit to live, we save alive those who—looking at them from a merely physical point of view—are most fit to die. Everything which makes it more easy to live; every sanitary reform, prevention of pestilence, medical discovery, amelioration of climate, drainage of soil, improvement in dwelling-houses, workhouses, gaols ”

“ The developments of scientific warfare, with its new and fearful weapons of death and its new modes of attack, laid new duties upon the medical profession and new demands upon its knowledge and its methods of healing. It restores one’s faith in human nature, after realizing the devilish ingenuity of the death and wound dealing instruments of the world war, to find how incessantly the ministers of healing worked in hospital and laboratory behind the lines to evolve new agents and new methods for the mending of the wreckage from the front. ”

“ In the very name of that humanity that you speak about, will you hesitate to sacrifice a thousand, twenty thousand infected beings in order to save millions of other human beings from the incurable pestilence? ”

“ With this Asiatic superstition or fatalistic belief, masquerading as Christian and scientific, in control of our institutions, all sanitary laws, such as the pure food law, the law requiring the fumigation of houses or the isolation of their inmates suffering from contagious diseases, the laws requiring the inspection of ships from plague-ridden ports, those requiring fireproof public buildings or providing for fire escapes and a hundred other safety-first measures, will receive scant attention.
To see and fight evil is wiser than to shut our eyes to it. ”

“ Individuals do not count. What counts is the results achieve by the inoculation of thousands of men. What counts is the reduction to nothing of typhoid cases in the army hospitals. What counts is the reduction to nothing of the army funerals due to typhoid. Modern war of men against men on the field of battle is now preceded by microorganic wars on the part of our surgeons before ever our men depart for the front. And, Heavens, what tremendous wars are waged by the surgeons! The mortality stuns one when endeavoring to contemplate its totality. ”

“ What is that secret power which lies concealed beyond the reach of human ken, and is transported from land to land unknown, till exposed in conditions suited to its operation, will show its active and resistless force in the destruction of life, and the devastation of whole cities or nations? You may call it plague, or cholera, or small pox, miasma, contagion, particles of matter floating in the air surcharged with disease, or any thing else. ”

“ The earnest hope that I might survive this powerful attack of disease has been based on the expectation, that if my life should be spared, I would consecrate it anew to the cause of suffering humanity—to the overthrow of all forms of despotism, whether spiritual or corporeal—to the promotion of peace and liberty throughout the world. ”

“ Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of the plague-stricken cities, howling like hyenas and lacerating their bodies in a manner too shocking to describe. After exhausting the available means of subsistence, the blood-smeared, wretches would invade the open country, and by frantic appeals frighten thousands of peasants into joining their ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and physical contagion to a neighboring country. ”

“ For the Union, the war had gone well in its first year, but it had been at a cost in suffering and death from wounds and disease at which the people were appalled. The Nation had gone to war in traditional hip-hip-hurrah fashion, with little regard for the visible dangers of the battlefield and even less regard for the invisible but more deadly dangers of the diseases that lurked in the unclean camps. ”

“ It is the abiding host of disease, the endemic and not the epidemic pestilence, the permanent overhanging mist of infection, the annual slaughter doubling in its ravages our bloodiest fields of conflict, that we are now summoned to grapple with. ”

“ How terrible,' people say, 'is war, with its wounds, bloodshed, and deaths! We must organise a Red Cross Society to alleviate the wounds, sufferings and pains of death.' But, truly, what is dreadful in war is not the wounds, sufferings and deaths. ”

“ We were beginning to realize slowly what a hell of torture and disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce choked with the offering to the war god; soldiers filling the highways ”

“ These conditions have been materially aggravated by the gathering together of great numbers of sick and wounded into overcrowded hospitals situate on or near to the theatre of war and destined inevitably to become hot-beds of disease and pestilence far more dangerous to human life, under these conditions, than even the most deadly weapons which the art of war had invented for use on the battle-field itself. ”

“ Daily Canadians and our Governments are being urged to eradicate diseases such as cancer, aids, tuberculosis - to suggest that any human being or a group of human beings are a disease is to invite extremists to take action and to give a justification for violence against them. ”

“ The man is dead, is killed, is murdered—but we cannot fix responsibility. Can we arrest for murder the poor mother who is caring for her boy sick with typhoid fever; just because she empties slops on a watershed that feeds a little brook, that feeds a river, that feeds a city—and thousands die of that widespread disease? ”

“ Your first duty, after you have gained sufficient strength of resistance and knowledge of your own powers, will be to help your murderers in and out of the flesh, restrain them from further evil, and raise them to a knowledge of their own vileness. You must help them to rise out of their hell, and never cease fighting with their inclinations until you have eradicated the disease and washed them clean. ”

“ If they can fight a bacterial war and produce an overnight cure at the same time ... we're at their mercy. There is no bomb ever developed—or that can be developed—to touch the power of what they've just demonstrated. ”

“ Here again our legislation is fettered by ignorance and religious dogma. On one hand, immense armies are organized to kill the most healthy men by thousands and tens of thousands, and many more thousands are abandoned to famine, prostitution, alcoholism and exploitation; on the other hand, medicine is expected to employ its whole art and efforts in prolonging life as long as possible and thus martyrizing miserable human wretches, degenerate in body and mind or both, often when they cry out for death! ”

“ Plagues, cholera, fires, flood, famine, all bear upon us with terrible force. Like war these events are entirely out of the common course of woes and necessities. Like death they are sure to come in some form and at some time, and like it no mortal knows where, how or when. ”

“ Lop off the unchristian armaments of the Christian Nations, extirpate these martial cancers, that they may feed no longer upon the life-blood of the people, and society itself, now weary and sick, will become fresh and young,—not by opening its veins, as under the incantation of Medea, in the wild hope of infusing new strength, but by the amputation and complete removal of a deadly excrescence, with all its unutterable debility and exhaustion. ”

“ They trace the fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. ”

“ Yet, while sane pioneers in medicine and surgery are patiently and devoutly following as best they can these complex but beneficent “laws of nature” for the saving of human life and the healing of human injuries, the insane section of the community have been and are still employing all their distorted energies of brain and hand in fiendish ingenuities of invention for weapons of war that shall destroy human life more quickly than it can be saved. ”

“ The use of expanding bullets and poison gases, the poisoning of wells, the abuse of the Red Cross and the White Flag, the destruction of churches and works of art, the infliction of cruel penalties on civilians who have not taken up arms—all such methods of warfare as these shock popular morality. ”

“ In the spring of last year, when the enemy was approaching, unseen and unheard, and the thousands of unconscious victims, who are now lying in their graves, were faithfully trusting and fully relying on the heads of our profession, and the resources of our art, what was the state of our defences, and what the nature or character of our resistance? ”

“ The law of which we are the instruments strives even through the carnage to cure the wounds due to the law of war. Treatment by our antiseptic methods may preserve the lives of thousands of soldiers. Which of these two laws will prevail, God only knows. ”

“ Returning troops spread the seeds of disease among the civil population, causing epidemics that lingered, in some instances, for several years and carried off many thousands of non-combatants, in addition to the great number of victims among the combatants themselves. ”