CHAPTER VII

PUBLIC HEALTH
By WALTER BOOTH ADAMS, M.D.1

There is no cure for the body apart from the soul; and the reason
why so many diseases elude the physicians of Greece is that they know
nothing of the soul.

—SOCRATES.

Introduction

Dr. von Diiring, a distinguished German specialist,
prepared a report early in the present century in which
he expressed his firm conviction that "unless radical
measures were taken to check the widespread diseases
with which he had to deal, the Turkish population would
be extinct in two generations." (E. Pears, "Turkey and
its People"). While this statement is certainly too
pessimistic, still the opinion given was partly substan-
tiated in a personal conversation which I had in 1920
with a British medical staff officer attached to the Allied
Forces of Occupation at Constantinople. The discour-
aging features are governmental inefficiency, the igno-
rance and suspicions of the inhabitants, and the lack of

aBorn at Constantia, New York, 1864; AJB. 1887, New York University;
M.D. 1890, New York University; A.M. 1890, New York University, Post-
graduate work in chemistry at Ms alma mater in preparation for the ap-
pointment to the chair of Chemistry, Materia Medica and Therapeutics in
the Syrian Protestant College, universally known through the Orient as the
American University at Beirut; passed his examinations before the Ottoman
Imperial Medical Faculty for license to practise medicine in Turkey; after
twelve years' experience relinquished teaching of chemistry; has seen and
treated over 60,000 new cases of skin diseases at Beirut; lecturer on con-
tagious diseases in the Nurses} Training School of American University;
member of the Beirut Executive Committee of the Lebanon Hospital for
Mental Diseases,

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