¶ Pathology: Preventive vs. Curative (1)
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Index Entry
"Nobody seemed to know where the housing traditions and the diseases they bred came from and why they were going on. I could not seem to be able to maintain health conditions as I wanted them in the kind of rentals I could afford, and I blamed it very much on housing. The more I saw of the housing world the more it seemed to me that about this great ignorance much could be done if we could think of our whole economics in the terms of preventive pathology instead of curative pathology. In our curative pathology we wait until somebody is very sick, and if they are lucky they might be able to get the right drugs from the research institute. I am talking of the picture of 1927.
“This present war has, however, seen an enormous advance in these curative matters. One of our boys here today had an infection in his nose which started in his eye the day before yesterday. They rushed him to the hospital and they gave him penicillin. He is all right now. It might have been a fatal case a few years ago, since the infection would have gone right up into his brain. It is just wonderful; but that has happened now in 1946. War releases an enormous amount of technology, and that is at least one benefit showing up.”
