Antique

The history of public hygiene is found in the history of the governments and legislations of the various peoples that have existed or exist. Public hygiene has existed and should have existed at all times, but more or less formless, more or less well understood. In all towns and in all centuries there are laws, practices, customs, institutes or monuments that accredit the attention paid to public health. Epidemics, plagues, physical degeneration and moral corruption have at all times made people and governments aware that those calamities were largely the bitter result of hygienic transgressions, and that something could be done to avert them. Hospitals, lazarettos, cemeteries at a distance from towns, urban police, rural police, etc., have not been established and adopted until a harsh punishment or a disastrous occurrence has made their need felt or made people believe in their usefulness.

There is great ignorance about the institutions and health practices used by the Chaldeans and even the Egyptians. Of the latter it is known, however, that their priests (the same as later the Levites in the people of Israel) were the only ones who could practice Medicine and that public hygiene was also entrusted to them.

Moses, the great legislator of the Hebrews, took special care regarding public health. The dietary regime from which many mammals, fish and birds are excluded, the prohibition of marriage alliances with strangers, the frequent ablutions and purifications, circumcision, the kidnapping of those infected and particularly of lepers, etc., are hygienic measures that stand out in the law of Moses, in that immortal law that still has observers after nearly 3,500 years since it was promulgated. And let us note in passing that Moses always tried to identify with religious beliefs the rules of health that he prescribed for the Jews, in order to give them a more intimate character of obligation and respect.

The acts of Solomon's splendid reign also attest that public health was not entirely neglected at that time.

The wise laws of Lycurgus "Lycurgus (Sparta)") and Solon, the writings and the hygienic-legislative institute of Pythagoras, tell us that the health of the people was considered by those illustrious legislators as the first condition of well-being.

Hippocrates, the great doctor, writer and philosopher, was also a great hygienist. In his works you can find everything most important about hygiene; and the book he titled On Air, Water and Places, whose consequences Aristotle and Montesquieu were able to explain so magnificently, is a precious and special treatise that will always be fruitfully consulted by the hygienist. It studies the pathogenic influence of winds on the health of cities and buildings, demonstrating the importance of the copy and good quality of water, the frequency and predominance of certain diseases depending on places, seasons and climates. An attempt is made to explain, by topographical conditions, the physical and moral differences that the inhabitants of Europe and those of Asia, etc., have among themselves. This book and the several he wrote on diet, epidemics, etc., make Hippocrates the first author of private and public hygiene.

In the works of Plato and particularly in his Laws and in his Republic, a complete course of legislative and administrative hygiene is contained.

Plutarch, the restorer of the principles of Pythagoras, was also a great hygienist, whether we admire him in his philosophical writings, or whether we follow him in his acts of administrative police while he carried out with laudable zeal the functions of archon and great priest of Apollo that his homeland conferred on him.

The Romans offer us their aediles, their public baths, their gymnasiums, their canals "Canal (engineering)"), their aqueducts, etc. to prove that they were not in any way indifferent to the public health sector. It is added that preventive medicine was highly revered among them, just as polydrug doctors or medici circumforanei as they were ironically called were disdained.

Reaching the centuries of the Church, we find the quadragesimal diet, a highly hygienic institution, as favorable to the preservation of the individual as it is to the increase of the population. The Gospel, for its part, is a course of the healthiest morality and therefore a course of private and public hygiene.

In the century Muhammad wanted to oppose the Koran to the Gospel and he did not neglect ablutions, fasts and other various practices and rules of hygiene to which he also gave, like Moses, the character of religious precepts.

Modern Age

In the following centuries, public hygiene continued to go through various phases according to the various course of events and the progress of the respective civilization of the empires. In that history, Spain would not be snubbed. There, wise laws on the practice of Medicine have been passed since ancient times, famous schools and academies have been founded for its teaching, hospitals and insane asylums have been established before other nations. Spanish is the initiative in the formation of methodical topographies; Spanish is the initiative of the morberias or quarantines, established for the first time in Mallorca in the year 1471, Spanish is the good organization of the mancebías, Spanish and founded by Isabel la Católica, it is the first military field hospital that existed in Europe, etc.

Germany is the country that surpassed all those in Europe in terms of public hygiene. In 1764 Rau published a little work in German on the need for a medical police regulation in a State. In 1771 Arnold published a Latin dissertation on the suppression and reform of things contrary to public health. In the same year Liebing published another similar dissertation also in Latin. In 1777 Baumer, a professor in Giessen, published the Fundamenta politice medica, cum annexo catalogo commodce pharmacopoliorum visitationi inserviente, a notebook of about 200 pages in 8th grade, very succinct, and for the use of his disciples. Finally, a work by Sussmilch, a Protestant pastor, became very notable, written in German, and whose title can be translated as follows: The order of divine Providence manifested by births, deaths and the increase of the human species. It is a work full of data and important research about the population of Europe. Its author makes several forays into the field of public hygiene and is said to have dealt very masterfully with the issue of luxury as a cause of disease and depopulation.

These are the main books that began to give a special literature to public hygiene as it is understood today. Its authors are all German but all of them must have been surpassed by their compatriot Frank.

Johann Peter Frank") gave birth (1776) in Manheim to a notebook in 8th grade with the title Epistola imitatoria ad erudites de communicandis quc e ad politiam medicam spectant, principum ac leyislatorum decretis. This invitation, which contained the plan of the medical police work that Frank proposed to publish, was read with applause but did not give the expected results since very few scholars sent materials to its author. This, however, began, in 1779, to give birth to his System einer vollstcendtgen medizinischen Polizey which was certainly very celebrated and with which he established the main basis of his reputation. It is an immense collection of laws and decrees taken from all the legislations of the world, both ancient and modern. The author says everything but does not have a great method and is also very verbose. He did not excel in the physical and natural sciences that are so closely linked to the progress of political medicine, nor were these sciences in his time as advanced as they should be so that they could enlighten him in all the details of application that require the help of those. But despite all these imperfections, Frank's work will always be a glorious monument of perseverance, zeal and good will. Public hygiene will always count the Medical police system as one of its richest and most important. venerable deposits.

Given the signal by Frank, several more or less complete treatises have successively appeared. Metzger, Elsuer, Hebenstreit, Husty, Schmidtmann, Scherf, Schraud, Bucholz, Pyl; Rober (Of the interest with which the State must look after the health of the citizens, Dresden, 1806, a small volume in 8.°); Heberl and Jacobi (Medical Police Yearbooks for Bavaria, Landshut, 1810); Augustin (Archives of Political Medicine, Berlin, 1804, 3 vol. in 8th); Kopp (Yearbook of Political Medicine, Frankfurt on the Mein, 1808-1820, 12 vol. in 8th); Knape and Hecker (Critical Yearbook of Political Medicine, Berlin, 1806, 3 vol. in 8th), C. F. Daniel, Remer and several other Germans have continued to cultivate the new field.

In France this cultivation has been promoted by Adelon, D'Arcet, Cabanis, Chevallier, Esquirol, Foderé, Marc, Mahon, Orfila, Parent-Duchátelet, Portal, Ratier, Sainte-Marie, Trebuchet, Villermé and several others. Most of them recorded the fruit of their work in the Annales d'hygiéne, Pública et de médecine légale, a quarterly publication that began in 1829.

Spain, although it counts its main glory in the past, can cite the names of Salvá, López Mateos, Morejón, Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Fabra, Merli"), Ardévol and others whose works, whether less famous or more modest, did not fail to promote the cultivation of public hygiene.