(The media took some not-unexpected bashing during the Republican National Convention last week. It bashed back by pointing out the numerous misleading and false claims that fell from the lips of various speakers. There also were misleading and false claims in the Democratic convention that were pointed out although one fact-checker said the challenged “truths” of the entire Democratic National Convention “didn’t have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republican convention.” In a time when medical treatments for a terrible disease are almost desperately sought, and fact-checking has become more necessary in contemporary medical as well as political circles, it might be time to turn to Dr. Frank Crane, a retired Presbyterian minister-turned-newspaper columnist whose writings were widely published a century ago when he referred to—-)
PRINTERS’ INK AS A MEDICINE
Printers ink is saving more lives than any other single agency employed by modern health-workers,” said Edward A. Moree, assistant secretary of the New York State Charities Aid Association, in an address at Rochester the other day.
Right for him!
Printers’ ink is the essential liquor of democracy. Kings hate it. All the manipulators of privilege dread it. It is poison to the tyrant of the Old World and the boss of the New.
It is the “sine qua non” of liberty. Liberty to human souls is what light is to human bodies.
Where there is no liberty there is darkness. Where there is darkness there is disease.
It is printers’ ink that has scared the food fakers. Only at a good round of printers’ ink will the vile, carrion flock of unclean birds that fatten on human credulity and ignorance take flight, they that sell plaster of Paris for bread, carpenter’s glue for candy, and God knows what vileness for fish, flesh, and fowl.
Printers’ ink has prevented more tuberculosis than all the doctors have cured. It has spread right ideas of sanitation, upset old mildewed superstitions, opened windows, lured people outdoors, flooded fearsome brains with truth and despairing hearts with hope.
It has built hospitals and supports them.
It has prevented epidemics, driven hush-mouth authorities to activity in remedial measures of cleansing. Cholera and smallpox were conquered by it; malaria and yellow fever flee before it.
It is all well enough to give an individual Epsom salts or calomel, but what the public needs for what ails it is plenty of printers’ ink.
There is some value in the medical profession, but also a deal of hocus-pocus, as there is in everything that becomes professionalized. The best part of the science of medicine is that part which can be told in plain language so that the common man can understand. Every newspaper ought to have its health department.
What people need to know is the truth about health, about food, and about simple living. The more truth they know the less drugs they will take, the less useless and harmful food they will eat, and the less they will run after religious cure-alls and crazy fads.
The newspaper is the health of the state.
“You may cure individuals of their ills in the privacy of the sickroom,” says Mr. Moree, “but to cure the public of its ills you must get into the newspapers.”
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If you want to read a more complete version of Moree’s feelings about health and newspapers, you can go online and find an article he wrote for The American Journal of Public Health, February, 1916. The article is “Public Health Publicity: The Art of Stimulating and Focusing Public Opinion.” https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.6.2.97 He also wrote on “Public Health and Politics.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000271621606400114