Civics and Health | Page 8

quickly to an appeal for the rigid enforcement of
health laws than the merchant class; none will oppose so bitterly as that
which makes profits out of the violation of health laws.
TABLE II
COST IN LIFE CAPITAL OF PREVENTABLE DISEASES[2]
=============+============+========================
=================== | | Multiply by the number of deaths for each
| Estimated | age group to learn the cost in life | Value of | capital to
your community in loss of life Age | Human Life | from one or all
preventable diseases.
-------------+------------+------------------------------------------- 0-5 years |
$1,500 | 5-10 " | 2,300 | 10-15 " | 2,500 | 15-20 " | 3,000 | 20-25 " |
5,000 | 25-30 " | 7,500 | 30-35 " | 7,000 | 35-40 " | 6,000 | 40-45 " |
5,500 | 45-50 " | 5,000 | 50-55 " | 4,500 | 55-60 " | 4,500 | 60-65 " |
2,000 | 65-70 " | 1,000 | 70- " | 1,000 |
=============+============+========================
===================
Anti-nuisance motives do not affect health laws until people with
different incomes and different tastes try to live together. In a small
town where everybody keeps a cow and a pig, piggeries and stables
offend no one; but when the doctor, the preacher, the dressmaker, the
lawyer, and the leading merchant stop keeping pigs and cows, they
begin to find other people's stables and piggeries offensive. The early
laws against throwing garbage, fish heads, household refuse, offal, etc.,
on the main street were made by kings and princes offended by such

practices. The word "nuisance" was coined in days when neighbors
lived the same kind of life and were not sensitive to things like house
slops, ash piles, etc. The first nuisances were things that neighbors
stumbled over or ran into while using the public highway. Next, goats
and other animals interfering with safety were described as nuisances,
and legal protection against them was worked out. It has never been
necessary to change the maxim which originally defined a nuisance:
"So use your own property that you will not injure another in the use of
his property." The thing that has changed and grown has been society's
knowledge of acts and objects that prevent a man from enjoying his
own property. To-day the number of things that the law calls nuisances
is so great that it takes hundreds of pages to describe them. Stables and
outhouses must be set back from the street. Every man must dispose of
garbage and drainage on his own property. Stables and privies must be
at least a hundred feet from water reservoirs. Factories may not pollute
streams that furnish drinking water. Merchants may be punished if they
put banana skins in milk cans, or if they fail to scald and cleanse all
milk receptacles before returning them to wholesalers. Automobile
drivers may be punished for disturbing sleep. Anything that injures my
health will be declared a nuisance and abolished, if I can prove that my
health is being injured and that I am doing all I can to avoid that injury.
No educational work will accomplish more for any community than to
make rich and poor alike conscious of nuisances that are being
committed against themselves and their neighbors. The rich are able to
run away from nuisances that they cannot have abated. If proper
publicity is given to living conditions among those who do not resist
nuisances, the presence of such conditions will itself become offensive
to the well-to-do, who will take steps to remove the nuisance. Jacob
Riis in this way made the slums a nuisance to rich residents in New
York City and stimulated tenement reform, building of parks, etc.
Anti-slum motives originated in cities where there is a clear dividing
line between the clean and the unclean, the infected and the uninfected,
the orderly and the disorderly, high and low vitality. As soon as one
district becomes definitely known as a source of nuisance, infection,
and disease, better situated districts begin to make laws to protect
themselves. A great part of our existing health codes and a very large

part of the funds spent on health administration are designed to protect
those of high income against disease incident to those of low income,
high vitality against low vitality, houses with rooms to spare against
houses that are overcrowded. To the small town and the country the
slum means generally the near-by city whose papers talk of epidemic
scarlet fever, diphtheria, or smallpox. Cities have only recently begun
to experience anti-slum aversion to country dairies whose uncleanliness
brings infected milk to city babies, or to filthy factories and farms that
pollute water reservoirs and cause typhoid. The last serious smallpox
epidemic in the East came from the South by way of rural districts that
failed to notify the Pennsylvania state