When speaking of preventative medicine, we include the methods used by physicians, state and federal government boards of health, etc.., to prevent the spread of disease, the most important is the work done by past and present men of science and their willing patients who have given their time, labor, and in many cases, their lives to discover the underlying causes of disease, for the latter, like everything else in the world, has its reasons for existence.  Thus it can readily be understood the disease cannot be properly prevented when the underlying cause is unknown.

Before does section of the human body and experiments on animals were permitted, man's knowledge of his own body and disease, its causes and symptoms and treatment was mere guesswork.  Thus in past centuries the arteries are thought to contain error instead of blood; disease was believed to be a curse from heaven or the king and everything lay in the hands of the gods as to whether a person recovered or not.

This in the last century, man began to awaken from his sleep and by means of the discovery of the microscope and the permission to experiment upon living animals more and more the cause of disease, its transference from one animal to another and then from animal to man and man to man was tried, and it was the same symptoms occurred in the animal or man into which the blood of the animals suffering from the original disease had been placed by injection into their blood, etc.  By these methods gradually the cause of disease was found to be due to the presence of minute living bodies called bacilli or germs, etc., but it's which were only visible when the blood, spit, urine, etc., of the sufferer was examined under the microscope and from this beginning are due the marvelous results of the present day in the prevention, treatment and cure of disease.

Health.-disease can be prevented by the individual doing everything in his power to keep in the best physical condition.  Disease is a common enemy of all of us, waiting to destroy, but nature is in league with us if we obey her laws.  With a normal body and pureblood should the invader arrived, the fight is on our side.  But once the body is weakened by heredity as a result of our parents or forefathers neglect of the body, through the abuse of alcohol, tobacco or in moral living, lack of exercise, over eating and loss of sleep, overworked or lack of work or improper food, then will the soil be fertile for the planting of the germs of disease.  When exposed and once planted the flight will be in their favor, as the rundown body will not have sufficient vitality to overcome the invader and sickness and death result.

So this is the kick off of the preventative medicine section.  I find this particular section interesting as it talks about the benefits of animal testing, which was very important in the early evolution of medicine and science but today is viewed much differently than it was then.  These days we'd perform a review of these procedures much differently than we did then, just like we review people differently such as Alli.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Lead Palsy
  
  

  Lead Palsy. — under some special circumstances, not at present well understood, extremely minute amounts of lead in water may prove injurious. Thus, for example, Dr. Angus Smith speaks of cases in which lead paralysis, or palsy, was apparently produced by water containing only 1/100TH of a grain of lead to the gallon.

  I’d like to veer off the topic of lead poisoning for a second and just meditate on the fact that until I engaged in reading this section of the book, I had not taken the time to learn the definition of ‘palsy’

  Is is actually an alternative to the word paralysis, and might even be a slang term or abbreviated version of the word.  My own apathetic ignorance as it relates to this word, which to my ears in 2008 even sounds a little politically incorrect, speaks to a decrease in the threat of cerebral palsy even though paralysis (palsy) is still a real problem as a result of injuries.  I might be more in tune with seeking a car insurance quote than fearing for the potential of developing palsy as a result of lead poisoning.

• Composition of the Chest
  
  

  Composition of the Chest– the chest is composed of bones, cartilages, and ligaments.  Its natural form is that of a cone diminishing upward; and it affords lodgment of the heart, lungs and large blood vessels.  Its walls are formed posteriorly by the seven dorsal bones of the spinal column, and the ribs as far as the angle, the sides by the body of the ribs, and front by the ribs, the costal cartilages and the breast bone.

  This section is about as exciting as you’d expect from a medical textbook.  It’s almost unique in the fact that it has no items comments or issues that don’t seem like they would appear in a medical textbook.  Some of the descriptions seem rather basic, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to find something unique about this section.

• Lice
  
  

  Lice.—The body louse has been found to be a carrier of typhus fever. It carries the germ in its body after biting a sufferer from the disease and by biting a person can inject the germ into his blood. Lice belong to the insect family. The species which infest human beings are about 1-10 of an inch in length and are found on the covered regions of the body and clothing.

  A difficult and stigmatized task, removing head lice is a honerous task, about as difficult as upgrading a video card on a laptop.

  Lice always grow from the eggs laid by an adult louse and never originate from filth or other matter. They hatch out within a week and the young are capable of reproduction in less than two weeks. A single adult female will produce 5,000 lice within eight weeks.

  The annoyance of these pests biting a human being will cause, if sufficiently prolonged, a nervous irritation, and a condition of ill health follows. There are three types of lice which infest man. The Head Lice (Pediculus Capitis), the Body Lice (Pediculus Vestimentorum) and Crab Lice (Pediculus Inguinalis).