"The Spectator."

(July 7, 1906.)

Extract from critique on Dr Sainsbury's 'Principia Therapeutica':—

A consideration which will at once present itself is the extreme desirability of teaching some elemental knowledge of the laws of health during the educative and receptive period of life. Just as the physician of the soul rightly demands that a child should be instructed in the rudiments of his faith, so may the physician of the body claim that some kind of catechism of health should be learned understood and practised during youth. . . . Preventive medicine cannot directly teach self-restraint but it can and does teach what is and what is not harmful to life and health Curiously enough, however, it at present deals solely with communities and takes no thought for the individual. It protects the community against he individual, but does not protect the individual against himself. This task is left to the family doctor, and too often he finds reason to deplore that he has had no chance of giving a timely warning, that the golden opportunity, when it would have been of real service, has lone passed by He is listened to only when curative measures are urgently needed; he is expected to act not to teach: and his influence is rarely felt beyond the immediate needs of the moment. No one in fact, practises preventive medicine as regards the individual—it is perhaps because we are in doubt as to whether this task belongs to the teacher or to the doctor that it is undertaken by neither the one nor the other.