Have you met Uncle Sam, MD?

Public health

If you want better health, pay the price. Money spent in protecting the health and the likes the people is the best of all investments. Don’t be too eager to pass more health laws; provide sufficient means enforce those already on the statute books.

It is a well-known axiom that public health is, within certain limits, a purchasable commodity, and that each community practically fixes by its sanitary policy its sickness and disease rates from such preventable diseases as typhoid fever, malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc. The best indication of the adequate or inadequacy with which a community is handling his health problems is shown in the ability of the existing health organization to lessen the prevalence of sickness.

In the interests of economy and efficiency, for instance, all sanitary work, be it child hygiene, industrial sanitation, school hygiene, milk control, etc, should be centralized and coordinated under properly equipped departments of health. Local health administration must be strengthened by the employment of health officers giving their entire time to their duty and fully responsible to the state department of health. The public health service holds that at least 2% of the public revenue should be spent for sanitary work, since for no other expenditures is so much profit ultimately derived.

Prevention of Complexes

Question: I have a daughter of 16. She has such a temper of late that I really don’t know what to do. Not only that, but she has no ambition to do anything. Many’s the time I hear her throw herself upon the bed crying, “I wish I was dead, I have nothing to live for.” At any little thing her temper will rise.

She weighs 126 pounds. My husband and I have talked to her, telling her nicely not to be so, but it makes no difference. Of. late, she has begun hating men, because she hears of so many girls getting into trouble by them. She is pretty and many a man turns to look at her, making the temper come back worse than ever. Headaches follow. Do you think it is serious? Ought I to see a doctor?

Answer: Your daughter has arrived at the age in which she is undergoing tremendous physical and mental readjustments and requires very careful supervision to prevent the formation of “complexes” which may mar her whole future. The origin of the complex is easily understood if you recall that all of us are born possessed with certain primitive instincts such as love, fear, hatred, anger, self-protection, and the sex instincts. These instincts are more or less restrained in all of us by training and certain social customs and usages. However, in spite of these restraints, one or more of these instincts may be so strong in a given individual as to set up a subconscious conflict between primitive desire and the instinct on the one hand and the restraints of training and social usages on the other.
The result of this complex may be something different from either the desire or the restraining influence, such as bizarre, queer and unusual actions and impulses. This is known as a complex. You see, therefore, how important is that your daughter should be properly guided during this highly impressionable period. This guidance should be based on the advice of a physician qualified to give such advice following examination of your daughter.
If you will send me your name and address, I shall be glad to send a mental hygiene leaflet for teachers which will give you some idea the development of faulty traits of character which seriously interfere with the child’s adjustment to his or her environment in later life.

—The Brisbee Daily Review, December 31, 1920