ADDRESS 
ON OPENING OF 
The Institute of Hygiene 
OF THE 
University of Pennsylvania 
BY 
S. WEIR MITCHELL, M.D., LL.D., Harv. 
\ 
Chairman of Committee on Hygiene 
PHILADELPHIA 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS 
1892 Mr. Provost, Trustees, Gentleme7i a?id Ladies: 
I appear before you to-day officially as Chairman 
of the Committee on Hygiene of the University of 
Pennsylvania. I am here, also, to represent my 
friend, Henry Charles Lea, that I may make over 
to the Trustees the completed Laboratory, which 
he has built for the teaching and study of hygiene. 
This, my very pleasant task, shall be brief. I 
am about, Mr. Provost, to give you another man’s 
gift. For the moment, I am the owner. A faint, a 
subtile sense of the joy of being able, aye, more, of 
being willing to give on a scale so royal comes to 
me as I think of what I am about to do. I realize 
the honest joy such bounty brings to him who gives. 
I assure you that it fills me with an ardent, a philan- 
thropic desire that more of you should share the 
delight of liberal giving to this ancient school of 
learning. 
All that I might say as to the need for teaching 
and research in hygiene will be better said to-day 
by experts in this art and in the sciences which justify 
its precepts. But, as a physician, I am strongly 
moved to use this rare opportunity to preach a brief 
medical sermon. My text is taken from the first 4 
chapter and the first verse of a late writer on hy- 
giene. “ Hygiene aims to make growth more per- 
fect, life more vigorous, decay less rapid, death more 
remote.” 
To this rather material statement I would add 
another. The highest usefulness in life is only possi- 
ble with the highest standard of health. I no longer 
wonder that the ancients worshipped Health, the fair 
goddess Hygeia. Be pleased to observe that this 
was a feminine deity, a goddess of health. The fact 
is not without meaning. So great is my reverence 
for supreme wholesomeness, that I should almost be 
tempted to assert, that perfect health is virtue. At 
least, as a physician, I like to say that, in my opinion, 
and for men in general, health, the best health, is 
essential to the attainment of that efficiency which 
makes duties easy, and resistance to temptation a 
normal result. 
Speaking of the higher, the spiritual develop- 
ment of man’s faculties, a famous divine has said, 
“Yes, it is a good thing to be born again, but he who 
wins this new birth will be better born again for 
having first been well born.” The truth, the largely 
applicative truth of this epigram, comes home to 
every physician who has seen how much of the use- 
fulness of the good, and the productiveness of the 5 
intellectual, is crippled or lost because of physical 
failures due to follies in education, or to impairments 
growing- out of preventable maladies. 
I have a fixed belief that a population below the 
normal level of health is sure to be also below the 
norm of goodness: I am as firm a disbeliever in 
the utility of long-disordered health to make men 
better. You remember what Becky Sharpe said of 
goodness. “I should have been a good woman had 
I had ,£5,000 a year.” Trust me, a large income 
of health means for the many, capacity to live at their 
moral best for themselves and for their fellows. Pov- 
erty of blood, like poverty of pocket, has its temp- 
tations. 
Others to-day will tell you how the ill-health 
which comes to masses of men in epidemics affects 
the economic prosperity of a community—how 
vast is its influence, how untraceably far-reaching. 
I have chosen rather to hint at the ill results as to 
morals which may arise from lowered health, owing 
to the poverty it entails, the direct and indirect temp- 
tations it creates, the self-indulgence it fosters in a 
variety of forms. It were easy to point this moral 
with many a sad tale. The story of every great epi- 
demic—the plague, the cholera, yellow fever—is 
dark with histories of human baseness. But there 6 
are, in our vast cities, influences more or less capable 
of remedy, which cause no death and put none at 
once to bed, and which, nevertheless, entail on 
communities lowered conditions of health, affect the 
enterprise and spirits of men, and morally and men- 
tally depress so as in subtle ways to cause degra- 
dation, desire for alcohol and degenerative changes. 
In a few pregnant sentences I have tried to set 
before you this novel question of the influence of 
health on morals. I dare not linger on a tempting 
theme; I started with a text and find I have gfven 
you but a string of texts—may I not trust the ser- 
mon to your own intelligence? 
To teach the individual the preservative laws 
of life; to teach the city, the commonwealth, the 
country how to avoid and subdue epidemics; how 
to provide that every water course be kept sweet 
and pure; the air of cities uncontaminate; manufac- 
tories innocent to health—these are the large lessons 
which our schoolhouse of health is to teach. 
Thinking of our new enterprise, and, too, of the 
individual failures which may come out of an insuf- 
ficient capital of bodily health, I am suddenly reminded 
of the holiday which the nation is now keeping. No 
thoughtful American can face an audience to-day, 
whatever may be the more remote purpose of his 7 
speech, and fail to think of one great historic figure. 
Let me bring him into relation with our own business 
of the hour. He represents for me that admirable 
form of hygienic preparation for a time of strain and 
trial, which came out of a vigorous, manly, out-of- 
door struggle with the exigencies and risks of the life 
of an engineer and frontiersman. Sound alike in 
mind and body, of clean descent, his consummate 
physical health must have had much to do with the 
clearness of head, the constancy of energy, and the 
perfect courage which carried him through the 
wasting worries, the doubts and the darkness of 
disastrous days. It would be easy to make for this 
picture of successful health a sad, contrasted back- 
ground of historic failures, of national defeats, of 
perverted genius due to the want of this one thing 
—health. 
A hundred illustrations crowd upon my mem- 
ory, but without apology I turn from the great pres- 
ence I summoned for a moment to point the moral 
of the hour, and leave with you the thought of the 
value to greatness, aye, to all goodness, of sturdy 
health. 
And now, a brief summary of the history of the 
birth of this Laboratory and School of Health. 
A few years ago, a grave loss of one very dear 8 
to my friend, Henry Charles Lea, turned his ever- 
active attention to the progress of science in its later 
revelations of the cause of consumption. The vast 
discoveries of Pasteur led up to Koch’s convincing 
proof of the role played by minute organisms in the 
causation of tubercle. A multitude of like researches 
followed with confusing swiftness. One disease after 
another has been traced to its parent cause in some 
tiny agent of mischief. A row of culture-tubes in a 
laboratory, with their bright-colored organisms, rep- 
resents a Pandora’s box of pathological disaster. 
But a little while ago the strong advance of medicine 
seemed to be stopped as by a wall. Then of a 
sudden wide gateways opened, and behold, this 
magnificent outlook—this broad road with its num- 
berless byways—and so again we go forward with 
intellectually invigorated hope. 
Apprehending the value of the many ways thus 
open to beneficent knowledge, Mr. Lea proposed 
to us to create a School of Hygiene, in which not 
only should we teach the art to live, but where also 
the new and effective helpmate of hygiene—bacteri- 
ology—should be provided with means of develop- 
mental research. It became clear, somewhat later, 
that we could hope before long to place in directive 
charge of the whole work the one man best fitted 9 
for it in America—Surgeon John S. Billings, of the 
Army. The well-known modesty of my friend for- 
bids me to say too much of him. The varied tasks 
he has accomplished serve well to show that a man 
may be master of many arts, if only he be so con- 
structed hygienically as to be permanently endowed 
with that unending energy which this man has 
brought to the administration and construction of 
museums, libraries, hospitals, to the creation of un- 
surpassed catalogue and dictionary, to the medicine 
of war, and to the study of hygiene. This half-dozen 
men in one is the Director of our new enterprise. 
The fact that he was to be at its head induced Mr. 
Lea to increase his gift for a building to $50,000. 
On hearing of this, the late Henry C. Gibson at 
once offered $25,000 as means for equipment. 
I pause to render my tribute of thankful praise 
to the memory of this kindly, gentle and most gen- 
erous man. He had the art of giving with such 
courteous simplicity as made those who sought his 
bounty feel that he was the one obliged. He had, 
too, at need, the art of saying “No” in such a fashion 
that you felt sorry for his manifest disappointment. 
To no other man was this great school so deeply in 
debt for repetitions of large gifts. 
Mr. Lea has declined to be himself the immediate 10 
agent in transferring to the Trustees the admirable 
building, which is now fully fitted up and ready for 
active work. Standing here in his place, I am un- 
willing to annoy my friend of many years, by too 
vividly saying what I think of his thoughtful and 
splendid gifts to the Philadelphia Library and to this 
University. But I find it impossible to do as he 
would wish, and pass by without comment the man 
who has given us a new means of usefulness. I 
prefer to hurt his sense of reserve, rather than to 
sacrifice my own selfish sense of justice. 
As the head of the oldest medical publishing 
firm in the world, Mr. Lea was so fortunate, or rather 
so able, as to win for himself the leisure out of which 
has grown a series of historical works without rival 
in their special line. 
Most of you better know how often this quiet 
and retiring scholar has come out of his mediaeval 
studies to make a sturdy fight in the cause of politi- 
cal reform, and to wage fierce war against municipal 
misrule. My words would disturb him, were he here 
to-day, but, surely, we are not too prone to praise. 
There is a time for all things, even for honest recog- 
nition of a pure, a true, an honorable life, and of the 
good and manly work of a model American, a gifted 
scholar, a generous man. And now, he turns to give 11 
to this city the only institute of hygiene in America, 
and, with far-seeing thoughtfulness, asks that the 
engineer, the architect, and the physician we train, 
shall be obliged to profit by its lessons as part of 
their education. I have asked that he would at least 
say by proxy a few words, and here is the brief 
message he has authorized me to deliver. 
“My dear Dr. Mitchell: 
It gives me pleasure to respond to your request for a 
few words on the objects and motives which led to the 
founding of the new Laboratory of Hygiene. 
Of all the claims of your noble profession on the grati- 
tude of mankind, perhaps the chiefest is due to the zeal of 
its members in laboring as earnestly for the prevention as 
for the cure of disease. Scientific hygiene is essentially the 
creation of physicians who have ever been foremost in dis- 
covering and promulgating the facts and principles on 
which improvement of public health must be based. Great 
as have been the strides of this science during the past gen- 
eration, even more is reasonably to be expected of it in the 
future. It is not visionary to say that we are on the thresh- 
old of discoveries which promise, if rightly used, to relieve 
humanity from some of the distressing evils which have 
weighed it down in the past. To this most desirable con- 
summation the University of Pennsylvania makes a notable 
contribution in rendering the study of hygiene compulsory 
on all who seek its degrees in Medicine, Architecture, and 
Civil Engineering, and in organizing a Department of Hy- 
giene where scientific investigation and instruction can be 
conducted under the most favorable conditions. 12 
Important as will be the functions of this department 
in stimulating original research, perhaps even more imme- 
diately important to the community will be its educational 
activity in annually sending forth numbers of thoroughly 
trained and well-equipped hygienists. Through their 
agency we may expect that popular errors will be largely 
dispelled, and popular indifference to the laws of health will 
be removed. The mass of human misery directly traceable 
to these errors and this indifference can scarce be over- 
estimated. Of this our own city offers a pregnant example. 
No great centre of population is anywhere more happily 
situated than Philadelphia with respect to hygienic advan- 
tages. It has every requisite for healthful and prolonged 
life in its soil, climate, facilities for drainage, abundance of 
pure water within reach, ample space over which to spread 
without overcrowding. If proper respect were paid to 
hygienic rules, preventable disease would be virtually un- 
known among us, and our annual death-rate would not 
exceed fifteen to the thousand. Yet during the past year 
the interments amounted to 22,649, which in a population 
of eleven hundred thousand souls is over per thousand. 
Now this difference of per 1000 means about 6,000 
deaths per annum from purely preventable causes—6,000 
human beings snatched away before their time, and other 
thousands reduced to want by the loss of those on whom 
they were dependent. Yet, ghastly as is this aggregate, it 
is in reality the smallest portion of the evil. Experience 
shows that every death represents about twenty cases of 
sickness not immediately fatal, so that 6,000 preventable 
deaths per annum infer 120,000 cases of preventable sick- 
ness. Each case of sickness will average from 35 to 40 
days, so that every year in Philadelphia there are 12,000 
years of preventable sickness endured by its inhabitants. 13 
Think what an aggregate of suffering this represents— 
think of the thousands of families who are annually exposed 
to privation through the disability incurred by the bread- 
winner or by the mother—think how many of those who 
are hovering on the border between comfort and poverty 
are permanently plunged into pauperism through tempo- 
rary sickness—and you will agree with me that the De- 
partment of Hygiene, if rightly administered and efficiently 
supported by the public, will be not merely a valuable 
scientific adjunct to the University, but will be the most 
practical and the most useful institution of public benefi- 
cence that the community can have, for it will deal in the 
largest way with the causes of these vast evils. If it is 
blessed to relieve human miseries, it is still more blessed to 
prevent them. Faithfully yours, 
Henry Charles Lea.” 
What more can I add to this clear and touch- 
ing appeal ? ah! but there must be some among you 
who will read between its lines their own memories 
of glad young lives sacrificed to diseases which 
should hardly exist, or of the days of doubt and 
heartfelt anguish, which ended more happily, but can 
never, never be forgotten. There can be few of us 
in this typhoid-smitten city, who have not walked of 
late in the shadows of this needless calamity. Try 
to believe with me that, in a rightly organized muni- 
cipal life, these evils may be greatly lessened. They 
are not necessities of God’s making. Try, ah! try 
with us to think that much of pain and disease is 14 
but the stern consequence of some sin of omission 
or commission, or of the indifference and unintelli- 
gence of an inert community. 
Mr. Lea’s gift was conditioned on the raising ot 
$200,000 as an endowment. The trustees were 
themselves so assured of the need for this depart- 
ment that they gave in individual gifts not less than 
$35,000. The professors contributed $12,000, and 
the Provost was enabled to secure for it the endow- 
ment of the Pepper Professorship of Hygiene, 
amounting to $57,000. Altogether the endowment 
reaches $213,000, inclusive of Mr. Gibson’s gift. 
If now you will in turn permit me to read be- 
tween the lines of Mr. Lea’s letter, and be eloquent 
where he is mute, this would be his brief addition. 
The city and the community owe to my belief 
in their needs this school of health. A generous 
hand equipped it. To make it thoroughly all it 
should be—to buy for its use those precious instru- 
ments, competent chemists and bacteriologists—it 
lacks at least $75,000 of further endowment. Such 
words as these the giver of this laboratory might 
have used to the many in this city, who doubtless 
are ready to match his generosity. 
When we have trained within these walls our 
missionaries of health, we shall send them forth in 15 
our University Extension work to tell the people 
that sweet air and pure water should have a say in 
the ballot-box, and that whether Democrat or Repub- 
lican divide the spoils of petty city office is a matter 
contemptibly indifferent as compared to insuring 
for masses of men immunity from disease, pure air, 
space, playgrounds for man and boy, books, baths, 
music. For honest health, men, aye, and their off- 
spring, need more than security of steady employ- 
ment. Work without chance of play of brain and 
limb makes Jack a dull boy, and a dull boy is nearer 
to possibilities of disease than a happy boy. Believe 
me, this large-minded view of the hygienic needs of 
a people is essential to the fostering of the best 
physical, mental and moral qualities of a great 
nation. 
I beg leave, Mr. Provost and Trustees, in the 
name of Henry Charles Lea, to transfer to your 
keeping the admirable building he has erected. 
And you, sir, Director of the activities of our 
new laboratory, to you we confide with trustful hope 
the broadly human interests of this enterprise. We 
believe that, in its practical aspects, the more remotely 
valuable results of pure science will not be neglected, 
and that the work of this laboratory will represent 
that hygienic perfection of science in which constant 16 
energy, incessant experiment and observation, and 
a wise scepticism shall devotedly combine to evolve 
out of discovery knowledge applicative at last to the 
nobler uses of mankind. 
It is my ardent wish, Mr. Provost, that, through 
the long years to come, when you and I and all here 
are gone, the quality of the work still done within 
those walls may continually justify the bounty of my 
friend—may help to make the city which is dear to 
him and to me more wholesome, and may improve 
and lengthen the lives of men. Drawing of unusual form of disease of skin 
in a case of Hysteria.