Excerpt from The Chances of Death and the Ministry of Health The problems of death and the duration of life have at all times been the subject of much profound speculation and theoretical as well as practical analysis. The average as well as the maximum attainable duration of human life must needs be a matter of serious concern to the individual and the state. The mortality experience of mankind in the mass reflects, with admirable accuracy, the attained degree of civilization as exemplified in the human control of the death rate; or, in other words, the prevention and successful elimination of diseases due to unfavorable external and controllable conditions affecting the duration of life. The day has passed forever when the average duration of life was complacently accepted as preordained or a matter of pure chance. In place of a fatalistic conception of death, a new doctrine of social and individual control of the death rate prevails, which accounts for the material improvement in health and longevity, which, by trustworthy records, is shown to have taken place throughout practically the entire civilized world within a comparatively brief period of time. This marvelous change may properly be considered one of the wonders of modern science and a human achievement transcending, in its far-reaching practical importance and enormous benefit to millions of mankind, all of the other great inventions combined. The modern control of the human death rate is due chiefly to the results of systematic scientific research and, to an increasing degree, of individual and social conformity to the teachings of natural laws and facts disclosed by the discoveries of preventive medicine. The domain of medicine is no longer considered exclusively the province of the physician, whose functions are limited to its practice as a healing art. Modern conceptions of public health and sanitary science have enormously broadened the field of medicine in general and brought the teachings of its principles within the understanding of the mass of the people of ordinary intelligence. We are apt to think contemptuously of the practices of the Medicine Man of our native Indians, but in very truth the gulf which separates primitive medicine from modern surgery is not as wide as the gulf which separates the fundamental conceptions of preventive medicine from those of medicine limited in its functions to a healing art. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.