Friends and Foes by Surgeon General United States Public Health Service

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 18, 1915

Friends and Foes

By Surgeon General United States Public Health Service

GREAT things have small beginnings. A spectacle maker, Jan Leippersheim by name, living in Holland, invented a crude magnifying glass in 1608. Anton von Leuwenhoek, born in Delft, Oct. 12, 1632, improved this clumsy toy, and evolved a compound microscope which has become the most valuable sanitary tool yet devised by man. That first microscope was as far removed from the high-powered instrument of today as is the modern American from the savage. Yet by this faulty means, Leuwenhoek, naturalist, physician, and botanist, discovered certain minute bodies which he called “little animals.” He made drawings of these, and today we know them for those useful friends and malignant enemies of man—bacteria.

We spend our days surrounded by another world, a living world of countless billions, invisible to the naked eye, silent, tireless, destroying the living, consuming the dead, useful in the sciences and arts, yet often followed by a train of sickness, suffering, and death. A curious paradox this; yet bacteria are at once the greatest friends and the fiercest foes of every living thing. Not animals, as Leuwenhoek thought, but vegetables, bacteria consist of two classes,—those which prey on living things, and those which reduce to its original minerals, fluids, and gases every dead thing which they attack. They are of various shapes, round like marbles or straight like little sticks. They grow in clusters, chains, and in pairs. They are ubiquitous. The dusty air, the earth and its waters, the interior of animals and plants all contain them. They cause the fermentation of foods, they make cheese, they produce disease; and some of them, when killed and injected into an animal, protect it against the very disease which they would have produced if living. Many of them live as harmless creatures in the body of an animal for years, only to kill their host when the opportunity presents. Their study has given birth to a science, bacteriology, one of the foundation stones of public health.

Their mere presence does not necessarily produce disease. Recalling the parable of the sower, some bacteria fall by the wayside, some fall upon stony places, and some fall in good ground, and bring forth the fruit of suffering, perhaps of death. A normal, temperate life, free alike from the excess of idleness or overwork, the sound mind in the sound body, a cheerful, normal environment, these form the stony places in which bacteria take no root. The depraved appetites of mind and body, the dark and sordid atmosphere of penury, the nerve-racking and strength-undermining trades,—these prepare the good ground.

The great weapon against bacteria is cleanliness. The mastery over premature death lies to a great measure in our own hands. Clean persons, clean cities, clean workshops, and clean lives are the makers of public health. The United States Public Health Service and other sanitary bodies of this country are gradually bringing these facts home to the general public. In this way cleanliness is becoming more general, and the span of life in America is gradually being lengthened. All this is largely due to the microscope.—Surgeon General United States Public Health Service.