“There are some self-styled eugenists—…race breeders with the souls of cattle-breeders—who declaim that the prevention of disease is not in itself a good thing. They say the efficiency of the State is based upon what they call ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This war has smashed their rhetorical phrase. Who talks now about survival of the fittest, or thinks himself fit because he survives? I don’t know what they mean. I do know that in preventing disease you are not preserving the weak, but conserving the strong. And I do know that those evil conditions which will kill a weakly child within a few months of birth, and slay another when he reaches the teens, will destroy yet another when he comes to adult life.”

Halliday Sutherland, “Consumption: Its Cause and Cure” 4th September 1917.

markhsutherland

Mark H Sutherland is a facilitator and executive coach who lives in Sydney.

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