Excerpt from Personal Hygiene and Home Nursing: A Practical Text for Girls and Women for Home and School Use How often have you heard it said: "I wish the doctors in America were paid as they are in China, to keep their patients well and not to try to cure them after they become sick." It is true that in Europe and America medicines and medical treatments were for centuries given only to cure ailments present, and most of us are yet unwilling to pay for medical advice unless we are already ill. Yet, during recent years physicians have been devoting much time to searching out the causes of disease and to finding how to keep those already in health from becoming ill. These attempts at preventing sickness have been so amazingly successful that where all our modern knowledge is applied we are now able not only to control most communicable diseases but also to prevent many of the chronic diseases of middle and later life. Even the layman now recognizes that in the field of health, prevention is more effective than cure, and to a very marked extent we are using our physicians to keep us well rather than to cure us after we become ill. A full history of the advances in medicine and surgery that have been made during the last half century is not only most interesting, but is as thrilling as a tale of adventure. Many of those who have investigated the origin and transmission of disease have worked without financial reward, and some have even risked their lives deliberately that others might be saved from illness and death. 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.

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