Excerpt from The Rise of Preventive Medicine If any of my readers consider some of my subject matter to be remote from, or irrelevant to, the immediate issue under discussion, I would invite them to reflect upon the fact that the scope and setting of Preventive Medicine is as wide and universal as human experience has made it. It is concerned not only with one branch of the art and science of Medicine but with various ramifications of social, political, and religious circumstance. The ideal Of Medicine is the prevention of disease, and the necessity for curative treatment is a tacit admission of its failure; yet the ways and means of prevention, from the earliest times, have con stituted a part of the history of human conduct in the individual and the community rather than being merely instruments of the medical art. Many non-medical factors and influences lie at the basis of Preventive Medicine. It may, I suppose, be added with truth that human survival and the cultivation of human health and capacity have always been, consciously or unconsciously, among the first and most fundamental tasks of statecraft. 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.