Document 2KK5z13eGeKkbE5ERO14QmQL

ENGINEERING and HEALTH By HARVEY N. DAVIS PRESIDENT, THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS FRIENDS the doctors belong to an appealing profes of sanitation. By bringing abundant supplies of pure water sion. They deal with human suffering and work mira into towns and cities, a boon that only those who have lived or ges of relief. The practicing physician touches the traveled in arid regions can fully appreciate, by building sewers nis patients and their families in times of minor or ma and sewage-disposal plants, by modern methods of refuse col i brings calm competence for them to lean on, initiates lection and disposal, by the invention and fabrication of modern ipil activity when the urge to do something is especially plumbing fixtures which make cleanliness easy, and by a pa hd renews and strengthens the courage of all con- tient persevering fight against atmospheric and stream pollu |=The hospital provides, sometimes a little too im tion, engineers have undoubtedly saved many lives and relieved ply, but nevertheless effectively, a kind of care that the the world of much suffering. While the medical men have had Household can but seldom afford. The research worker to lead the way in attacking such diseases as hookworm, ma (cine wins dramatic victories over one disease after laria, and yellow fever, it has been the sanitary work of engi |by methods that the educated layman can c'ompre- neers that has put this hard-won knowledge into practical ef en if he cannot fully understand the detail of the fect on a large scale over considerable areas. Indeed in the -technique. To the general public it all seems like a whole field of public-health work and of preventive medicine ` Bonification of science at its best, working untir- in which so many forward-looking physicians are actively en Ifthe benefit of mankind. Perhaps it is for this rca- gaged, engineers are their indispensable allies. The tremen t, at least in reasonably prosperous times, generous- dous influence which these various sanitary' and other advances fjicn and women are so easily persuaded to make liberal have had on the general health level of the population as com ospitals, medical schools, and institutes for medical pared with that which prevailed in the middle ages is too strik ing to require further comment. wn profession commonly makes no such emotional ap- In the important matter of diet also, the work of the engineer c lay public. Our achievements are too often thought has been of importance. By the development of tin plate and ving an industrial rather than a human significance, of intricate machines for fashioning it, he has made possible `.in the street admires and trusts the engineer in a blind the canning of food on a tremendous scale, thus broadening and crimes extravagant fashion, but this admiration tends enriching the diet of the nation, and making available at all cold and impersonal as that which he accords to one of seasons, and in the most out-of-the-way places, foods rich in Shines. Does not the engineer deserve a warmer and vitamins and hormones. The development by engineers of re 'ectiocatc appreciation? If only we could make clear to frigeration on ships, on trains, in cold-storage warehouses, and s and to the public some of the things we arc doing or in the home, including the newest methods of quick freezing, do, that touch intimately the personal lives of men, has contributed to the same end. Irrigation, often involving gye not hope that the respect now commonly accorded us engineering projcccs of enormous magnitude, has helped the 'tinged with more of the emotion-stirring loyalty that farmer to produce food in greater abundance and often of finer 'n inspire active cooperation? quality. Still more fundamentally, the ships, trains, and ith this thought in mind that I have chosen to inquire motor trucks, by means of which most of the food of the nation t extent the engineer can be thought of as rivaling the is brought to those who consume it, were invented and de ijm in the promotion of health. In appraising this veloped, and arc fabricated and maintained by engineers. With jycompetition, let us not forget that, while the engineer's out them no modem urban population could exist. By these icnts are never as dramatic, spectacular, or individual means engineers have profoundly affected the dietary habits of 's the saving of a life or the restoration of a sufferer whole nations and have made possible the elimination of de orous effectiveness, the engineer deals, not with indi- ficiency diseases and of the lowered resistance to infection that as do most physicians, but with the great masses of malnutrition causes. omen, and children that constitute modern communi- In the matter of housing, also, engineers have played their Jf, then, the intensity factor of his health work is, per- part. They have improved rhe materials and methods of con [ess than that of the physician, its quantity factor is, in struction, and therefore both the availability and the usefulness , immeasurably greater. But any appraisal of the effec- of buildings of every sort. They have flooded houses, offices, of any sort of work, in physics or in life, depends on and workshops with eye-saving light. They have provided gnitude of a product containing both an intensity and a the central heating plant that insures a uniform coatrollable tity factor. If, then, the intensity factors of the various temperature throughout a house. Air conditioning is just coring activities that promote health are found to be far around the corner. By developing transportation they have than that zero which alone could nullify the significant enabled an urban population to find over a far-flung area more get, it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to suggest that the cn- healthful living conditions than were available even to the of today are contributing quite as much to the promo- well to do of, let us say, two centuries ago. ,fhealth as are the physicians. In all these obvious ways engineers have contributed to the most obvious, because the most direct, contributions of maintenance and improvement of the health of vast numbers of ers to the promotion of health lie, of course, in the field people. This is, however, by no means the whole scory. There er address delivered at the Semi-Annual Meeting, St. Louis, 'Jane 20-2}, 1938, of The American Society of Mechanical ' "BS. are certain other activities of engineers that have an even more significant effect on the health level of a nation. Consider first, all that is involved in what is called a national 663 664 Mechanical Engineering scandard of Jiving. Technical achievements in sanitation, in the production, transportation, and preservation of food, and in housing may determine what is available to those who can af ford to have what they want; but it is the national standard of living that determines what the average man actually gets. If the national scandard of living is low, there will be bad housing, bad sanitation, malnutrition, a prevalence of deficiency diseases, and a general lowering of resistance to infection that will be responsible for much sickness and many deaths. By far the most effective way of raising the general health level of any population is to raise its standard of living. This problem is, fundamentally, not medical but economic. The standard of living of a community is nothing else than its production of goods and services per capita per year. Unfortu nately this is not always the same as a community's capacity to produce per capita per year. At the moment, for instance, we apparently do not know how to make our economic sys tem function in such a way as to permit men to produce and consume all they could easily produce and would like to con sume. In the long run the actual production of a community per capita per year will be determined by its capacity to produce, and its capacity to produce will be conditioned largely by the possible production per man-hour of expended labor. In other words, in the long run, the only way to raise the standard of living of any community, and with ic the general level of the health of that community, is to increase what a man can do in an hour by giving him more inanimate slaves in the form of horsepower and kilowatts, by giving him- more and better cools and machines with which to work, by mechanizing and automatizing more of the routine operations in his productive processes, by working out technological advances and inven tions that displace some useful thing that is hard to make by something else equally useful and easier to make, by showing him how to handle things more deftly, and how to postpone or avoid fatigue, and by more effectively organizing the team work of the industrial unit in which he works. Only by such means as these can the standard of living of any community be permanently raised, and only engineers can provide these ele ments in the increased hourly productivity of the workman of today and tomorrow. By raising our scale of living in the future, as they have marvelously raised it in the past, engineers can markedly affect the future health level of the whole popula tion. Over shorter periods, a high standard of living is character istic of what we call prosperity. Anyone who ventures to talk about che business cycle is treading on dangerous ground. But ic is, I think, generally admitted that a characteristic of most waves of prosperity is the rise of an important new industry. The automobile and the radio are striking examples. What the next new industry will be, no one knows, but it is surely safe to assert that, when it comes, engineers will have been responsible for its genesis and growth. Only industrial activity, energized by the genius of the engineer, can generate good times. If then, it is to engineers that we must look both for the long-term trend, and for the cyclic bulges, in the upward progress of our standard of living, their part in the maintenance and improve ment of rhe health of the nation is great indeed. All that I have said chus far pertains to the physical health and well-being of mankind. But our friends the physicians know even better than the rest of us the importance of that other aspecc of men's lives that may be called mental health. Always important in itself, ic often influences, if ic docs not completely dominace, physical condition. Here too, engineers have important contributions to make in at least two different ways. The first depends on the fact that a considerable proportion of men and women spend more than a third of their waking hours on an industrial job of some sort. Someone has said that the chief difference between a professional man and a job holder is that the former lives through his work, the latter by means of it. I sec no reason why this cynical characterization of industrial work should be accepted as inescapably true, or why such work cannot be made to afford to the worker an acceptable and satisfying way of living. In fact I believe that many workers do thoroughly enjoy their work. Wc are all too prone to ignore rhe nonfinancial incentives and rewards of business and industry. Enjoying one's work is greatly enhanced by, if it is not actu ally dependent on, having a job that one can do well. This is where the engineers come in. They are beginning to feel their way into new fields of management which involve both ad justing jobs to their holders and assigning men to the right jobs. Adjusting a job to its holder may be done by a machine de signer or by a motion-study specialist. Many modern machines are already designed with special reference to the convenience and comfort to those who arc to operate them; though how much remains to be done is indicated by the saying of one of my friends that there is only one machine in the world that is per fectly adapted to the operator, and it took three thousand years to make it so--the machine in question being the ax handle. And to the extent that motion study is used to make jobs easier and less fatiguing, rather than merely to speed up production, it can confer great benefits on the worker. Assigning men and women to the right jobs holds even greater promise of materially raising the general level of mental health of the working population. Industrial managers are beginning to make notable progress in studying human beings objectively, in measuring individual differences, in appraising both the strengths and the weaknesses ofprospective employees, in cataloging the pattern of strengths and weaknesses most ap propriate to each particular job, and in assigning men and women to the right jobs. I could tell you, if time permitted, of men who came into an industrial testing laboratory restless and inefficient, sometimes even morose and uncooperative, be cause they had strong aptitudes of certain kinds on which their jobs made no demands whatever, and how, in many cases, re assignment of these men to jobs chat called into play all their aptitudes resulted within a year in almost miraculous altera tions in personality and outlook on life. I could tell you of women, trained at their own request as comptometer operators, who become nervous wrecks within a year because of the lack of a certain necessary aptitude which could easily have been de tected in advance. Nor should we forget the intangible but often important stimulation to personality that comes from the mere fact that one has been studied and measured, that one's abilities have been sought out and recognized, that one's life has been paid attention to and discussed as an individual ad venture. Not that the millenium is immediately at hand by any means; the engineer-managers of today have only just be gun to scratch the surface of this highly promising field, and he who tries to go too fast in it will come a cropper, and per haps temporarily discredit the whole field. Nevertheless I am convinced that this kind of activity will produce, in the next twenty-five years, a greater harvest of human satisfaction and mental health than any of us can yet conceive. Turning now to the second way in which engineers can hope to help bring more abundant mental health to the world, we find ourselve facing a much more difficult problem. Perhaps I