THERE IS so much unfinished business in the health field, and our current problems are so complex compared to those of only 50 years ago, that we are forced to agree that the potentials for community health development are great. The 20th century has seen the most dramatic discoveries in medical knowledge of any time in human history, and the resulting improvements, intertwined with other scientific advances, make it easy to forget how much our society has had to adjust to change and how vast the changes have been.
When I was a boy in the early 1900's a bad cold and fever were promptly treated with calomel, followed the next day by relatively massive doses of castor oil or, as one grew older, epsom salts. A major medical episode in our family during the first decade of the century was a ruptured appendix suffered by my older sister. It