Health and the Population

The vast technical advances achieved by man in the Western civilized world within recent centuries are briefly reviewed. It is pointed out in this context that the diagnostic procedures in the field of medicine have surpassed by far the therapeutic potentialities. A series of diseases due to life in misery such as tuberculosis, malnutrition, diseases involving the gastro-intestinal canal, avitaminosis, etc., are almost totally eradicated and, in contrast to the general belief, primarily because the material circumstances of life in our generation have been radically changed, secondly because of the “wonderful advances in the field of medical science”. The present study is concerned with a question of fundamental importance, namely whether a change in the vital circumstances as total as that experienced in the Occident within the recent 100 years at least, also may exert a positive influence on the mentality of man or whether he eternally is to remain the same, carrying along his existentialistic problems of life, uninfluenced by the evolution.