Document rpZ5Gnjy97XZ2rrBjYkGaEaK0

ENGINEERING and HEALTH By HARVEY N. DAVIS PRESIDENT, THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS FRIENDS the doctors belong to an appealing profcson. They deal with human suffering and work mira ges of relief. The practicing physician touches rhe ^'is patients and their families in times of minor or ma$ brings calm competence for them to lean on, initiates ulactivity when the urge to do something is especially d renews and strengthens the courage of all con^The hospital provides, sometimes a little too imy, but nevertheless effectively, a kind of care that the busehold can but seldom afford. The research worker pine wins dramatic victories over one disease after fby methods that the educated layman can compreen if he cannoc fully understand the detail of the technique. To the general public it all seems like a Nsonificacion of science at its best, working untirV thc benefit of mankind. Perhaps it is for this rcaJ, at least in reasonably prosperous rimes, generousjnen aad women are so easily persuaded to make liberal fhospirals, medical schools, and institutes for medical ..,yn profession commonly makes no such emotional aphe lay public. Our achievements arc too often thought "ving an industrial rather than a human significance, ffin the street admires and trusts the engineer in a blind ''"crimes extravagant fashion, but this admiration tends ;cold and impersonal as that which he accords to one of chines. Does not the engineer deserve a warmer and ecrionatc appreciation? If only we could make clear to gs and to the public some of the things we arc doing or do, that touch intimately the personal lives of men, Jwc not hope that the respect now commonly accorded us tinged with more of the emotion-stirring loyalty that m inspire active cooperation? "th this thought in mind thac I have chosen to inquire t extent the engineer can be thought of as rivaling the ~n in the promotion of health. In appraising this competition, let us not forget that, while the engineer's aencs are never as dramatic, spectacular, or individual 's the saving of a life or the restoration of a sufferer (irous effectiveness, the engineer deals, not with indi es, as do most physicians, but wich the great masses of fsromco, and children that constitute modern communi:Tf, then, the intensity factor of his healrh work is, per ils than that of the physician, its quantity factor is, in `1, immeasurably greater. But any appraisal of the effec ts of any sort of work, in physics or in life, depends on J gnitude of a product containing both an intensity and a "ty factor. If, then, the intensity factors of the various ecring activities that promote health arc found to be far Sc than thac zero which alone could nullify the significant pt, it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to suggest that the cnof today are contributing quite as much to the promoThcalrh as are the physicians. e most obvious, because the most direct, contributions of cers to the promotion of health lie, of course, in the field address delivered at the Semi-Annual Meeting, Sc. Louis, - , ,-June 20 23 1938 of The American Society of Mechanical es. of sanitation. By bringing abundant supplies of pure water into towns and cities, a boon that only those who have lived or traveled in arid regions can fully appreciate, by building sewers and sewage-disposal plants, by modern methods of refuse col lection and disposal, by the invention and fabrication of modern plumbing fixtures which make cleanliness easy, and by a pa tient persevering fight against atmospheric and stream pollu tion, engineers have undoubtedly saved many lives and relieved the world of much suffering. While the medical men have had to lead the way in attacking such diseases as hookworm, ma laria, and yellow fever, it has been the sanitary work of engi neers that has put this hard-won knowledge into practical ef fect on a large scale over considerable areas. Indeed in the whole field of public-healch work and of preventive medicine in which so many forward-looking physicians are actively en gaged, engineers are their indispensable allies. The tremen dous influence which these various sanitary and other ad vanecs have had on the general health level of the population as com pared with that which prevailed in the middle ages is too strik ing to require further comment. In the important matter of diet also, the work of the engineer has been of importance. By the development of tin place and of intricate machines for fashioning it, he has made possible the canning of food on a tremendous scale, thus broadening and enriching the- diet of the nation, and making available at all seasons, and in the most out-of-the-way places, foods rich in vitamins and hormones. The development by engineers of re frigeration on ships, on trains, in cold-storage warehouses, and in the home, including the newest methods of quick freezing, has contributed to the same end. Irrigation, often involving engineering projects of enormous magnitude, has helped che farmer to produce food in greater abundance and often of finer quality. Still more fundamentally, the ships, trains, and motor trucks, by means of which most of the food of the nation is brought to those who consume it, were invented and de veloped, and are fabricated and maintained by engineers. With out them no modem urban population could exist. By these means engineers have profoundly affected the dietary habits of whole nations and have made possible the elimination of de ficiency diseases and of the lowered resistance to infection that malnutrition causes. In the matter of housing, also, engineers have played their part. They have improved the materials and methods of con struction, and therefore both the availability and the usefulness of buildings of every sort. They have flooded houses, offices, and workshops with eye-saving light. They have provided the central hearing plant chat insures a uniform controllable temperature throughout a house. Air conditioning is just around the corner. By developing transportation they have enabled an urban population to find over a far-flung area more healthful living conditions than were available even to the well to do of, let us say, two centuries ago. In all these obvious ways engineers have contributed to the maintenance and improvement of the health of vast numbers of people. This is, however, by no means che whole story. There arc certain other activities of engineers chat have an even more significant effect on che health level of a nation. Consider first, all thac is involved in what is called a national 664 Mechanical Engineering standard of living. 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 standard 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 it 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 kilowates, by giving him- more and better tools 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 vve call prosperity. Anyone who ventures to talk about the business cycle is treading on dangerous ground. But it 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 ir is surely safe to assert that, when it comes, engineers will have been responsible for its genesis and growth. Only industrial activity, energized by che genius of rhe engineer, can generate good times. If then, it is to engineers that we muse 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 the health of che nation is grear indeed. All that I have said thus far pertains ro 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 aspect of men's lives that may be called mental health. Always important in itself, it often influences, if it docs not completely dominacc, physical condition. Here too, engineers have imporranc 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 chan 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 char the former lives chrough his work, the lacter 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. We are all too prone to ignore the 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 thac one can do well. This is where the engineers come in. They arc beginning to feel their way inco new fields of management which involve both ad justing jobs to their holders and assigning men to che 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 wich special reference to the convenience and comforc to those who are 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 ir 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 rhan 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 of prospective 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 thar 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 vve forgee the intangible but often important stimulation to personality that comes from the mere fact thac one has been scudied 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 thac the millcnium 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 che world, vve find ourselve facing a much more difficult problem. Perhaps I EPTEMBER, 1938 665 i over optimistic in even mentioning it as one that engineers r anyone else can hope to solve. And yet, in its various ramications, it is probably the most important problem that vilizarion faces today. I refer to the problem of industrial 'stability, the problem of the recurrent recessions and depres`qns that periodically throw millions out of work, and disrupt, metimes permanently, the lives of many of them, the problem fsocial insecurity. "That social insecurity can profoundly affect the mental, and jea the physical health of great numbers of people, is undubita'le. Worry has wrecked more lives than tuberculosis, and ere is no worry so insistent as that which besets a self-re specting industrial worker, and his whole family, if he chinks here is danger of losing his job, except that of a worker who as lost his job. I suspecc that this sort of worry is by far the ^ost important single factor in the American health situation pday. of industrial work and the effect of it on the whole lives of workers. The industrial type of thinking pins its faith to the hope chat all these tiny seeps forward, scattered all over the country and through many industries, influencing each the other both by the contagion of example, and by the educational process of thoughtful discussion, will integrate into a march of progress that, however halting and irregular it may at times appear to be, will have firm ground under its feet. The key to the whole economic and social situation, accord ing co this way of thinking, is the breeding of a sufficient supply of industrial administrators who have not only sound business judgment buc also enough social understanding and vision to better adjust the functioning of our present economic and indus trial system to the welfare of society at large. Many of us are hoping that such progress will be made rapidly enough to fore stall the motivation for, and the possibility of, too much legisla tive experimentation. {What hope is there of lightening this incubus of fear caused by duscrial insecurity? What hope is there of steady, perhaps veh of guaranteed employment? fTwo cypcs of thinking are current with respect to problems hf this sort, one political, in the best sense of that word, the Jthcr industrial. It is characteristic of the political type of Junking, whenever a social problem can be defined at all, to ttempt to solve it by enacting a law. This type of thinking holds, consciously or instinctively, that social progress can t be forced forward by legislation. This dogma, to those 'ho are persuaded of its validity, is comforting. It affords them an opportunity to do something abouc it, here and now, ithouc waiting for the slow processes of social evolucion. In yme cases reform by means of legislation is indeed the only practicable procedure, particularly when a recalcitrant fringe "f unsocial competitors has to be whipped into line with the tandards which a great majority would be glad to maintain if they could. But to coerce a majority to proceed faster along Jhe path of social progress than they are ready ro go, is a process oth difficult and dangerous even chough alluring. In such a sc, education is more to the point than legislation, i The political type of approach to the problems of today may, of course, succeed in remaking our world, particularly if ic be "enforced by plenty of emotion-stirring propaganda. It may Sven lead to the most effective forms of government that the vorld has yet seen. These new forms of government are, how ever, almosc certain to be highly centralized, closely integrated 'orms of government, exerting over industry, and over the lives pf citizens generally, the detailed regulation and control which Seem to be essential to making any planned economy work. Personally, even if I were sure thac the political approach would ilcad to highly efficient governmental forms and to really welljordcrcd lives, I would rachcr sacrifice some of this efficiency and orderliness co secure more individual initiative and responsi bility, more of a chance for each of us to make his own mistakes jnd enjoy his own triumphs. The industrial type of thinking about economic and social 'problems proceeds in quite a different way. Too often in the past, unfortunately, ic has tended to ignore such problems as long as possible, and when at last chey loomed up inescapably, it has tried to fight them insccad of to solve them. The in dustrial leaders of today, however, are beginning to have an "economic and sociological background with which to think through the remocer human implications of the decisions they make and the policies they pursue. They arc beginning to work out, step by step, each in his own business unic, some sort of social justice with respect to the conditions and rewards But, you say, where do engineers come into this picture? The answer is that more and more are engineering-trained men finding themselves in positions of executive responsibility in business and industry. There seems to be something about the training and experience of engineers that fits them for such work. Instinctively chey deal with facts rather than with traditions and emotional reactions. Their work forces ckem to see things in the large, ro fit details into long-range plans, to see visions and dream dreams, and then to translace them into reality by the careful organization of a multitude of various contributing activities. I believe that engineering-trained men are destined to contribute far more than their proportion ate share of che industrial leaders of the next quarter-century. If so, chey are facing a great opportunity and a great responsi bility. If they can learn to think around their jobs as well as thinking their jobs through, if from their natural vancage point as liaison officers between capital and labor, they can get a comprehensive vision of the aims, aspirations, poincs of view, and prejudices of both groups, if from their familiarity with the flow of materials through a factory or the flow of energy through a power plant they can derive a vivid picture of the flow of goods and of money through che channels of production and consumption, if their experience in handling men on the job can bring to them some understanding of how men want to live, chey can, perhaps, contribute more than any other single group co che solucion of those fundamental economic and social problems of which, we have been speaking. And if by these means chey can, even to a small extent, diminish the worries inherent in industrial insecurity, they will have made the great est coutribution of che century to the promotion of the mental health of vast numbers of people. May I, then, suggest that he.who is profoundly interested in maintaining and improving the health of mankind, and who has enough vision and imagination to sense the long-time trends of life, would do well to devote a considerable part of his energy, or of his beneficence, to fostering engineering education and re search. In particular he should be interested, not only in che technical aspects of the profession, but especially in those branches of it which are concerned with industrial management and wich the foundations on which sagacious industrial ad ministration muse rest. The results will not be so easy to ob serve, so direcriy and immediately obvious, as if he had been instrumental in training a succession of wise physicians or skilful surgeons, or in conquering some obscure disease, but in the long run, he will accomplish much improvement in both the physical and the mental health of his fellow men.