Recent news dispatches told of the serious illness of Frank A. Vanderlip, multi-millionaire and, until recently, head of one of the greatest American banks. His malady was diagnosed as typhoid fever.
In this there is fine satire. Undoubtedly a man of Mr. Vanderlip’s surroundings is not a sufferer from defective plumbing. It is to be presumed that his standards of cleanliness are scrupulous. It is certain that he drinks certified milk. He does not patronize the indiscriminate drinking glass. No deadly “old oaken bucket” in an equivocal well has a chance to infect him with its virus. Yet he is laid by the heels and his life put in jeopardy by a bacillus whose attack upon a child in a public school is signal for civic investigation!
Undoubtedly Mr. Vanderlip knew that there was a simple treatment through which he could practically insure against the risk of typhoid. But, unconsciously, perhaps, he permitted a certain arrogance natural to wealth and position to assume for him an immunity he did ot possess. Too confident of his safeguards, he forgot in a disrespect of germs that germs are no respecters of persons or personages.
Should Mr. Vanderlip die of typhoid, it would be cruel to suggest suicide, yet that would be the real effect of his neglect. So many ills lie in wait even for the wary as to make it close to a criminal act to fail to avoid those for which there is a clear means of prevention; for no man is so self-sufficient as to make negligence of his own person a personal matter.
In the case of the average citizen the obligation is more intimate and profound. In the touch-and-go of ordinary experience, the difference between health and sickness may will spell that between a generation of success or disaster. In the case of children, the love of a parent who would face death in their defense is sadly compromised when it refuses obvious means of keeping them free of disease.
Typhoid fever and other wasting and contagious diseases are every year yielding to the preventive methods of science applied as a public policy. In time it will be a disgrace to suffer in one’s family those afflictions which are really invited when they are not repelled. Yet in spite of the teachings of Boards of Health, of campaigns of immunization and free and convenient treatment, typhoid and other preventable diseases continue to take their annual toll.
In an arrogant egotism we are all too apt to assume, as Mr. Vanderlip, that while prevention is good for others, we ourselves are by some strange dispensation the privileged exceptions!
From page 4, the editorial page of the Carolina Jeffersonian, Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, January 1, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073001/1925-01-01/ed-1/seq-4/
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