The Role of Law in Public Health

Abstract

T O DEFINE the role of law in furthering the public health would be almost as large an undertaking as defining the role of law in the whole of our society. The public health is to the population at large what individual health is to each of its members, powerful force in shaping his life for better or for worse. Conceived positively as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, to borrow the words of the WHO constitution, health becomes synonymous with human existence at its best. In the sense of enabling ea.ch man to exercise his faculties at the highest level which his natural endowment makes possible, this is just description. In this sense the boundaries of the public health are really co-terminous with the boundaries of life. It is one thing to describe goal in all-encompassing terms and it is quite another to assign the workaday tasks that may lead us toward that goal. The WHO definition tells us nothing about how we are to get on with the job. But it does suggest that health is an infinitely complex affair, and that we cannot do what needs t,o be done without calling upon great many skills in addition to those supplied by the health professions themselves. It reminds us that we must look at the whole man and his whole environment. This is more easily preached than it is practiced, however, for each of us, specialist in greater or less degree, has difficulty in seeing the whole with the same clarity with which he observes his chosen part. We must therefore find ways to interrelate the many disciplines involved if we are to avoid fragmentation of our effort as consequence of the necessary fragmentation of our knowledge. A wider and wider range of specialized knowledge of the physical and biological world has formed the base for the advances of medical science, knowledge which increasingly lies beyond the ken of the medical profession as such. But the promotion of health, in the broad sense of the WHO definition, demands an equally wide and varied interplay with skills outside the realm of physical science. And here the problems of producing effective teamwork may be even more difficult. How, for example, and under whose leadership, are we best to blend the skills of the social worker with the skills of the physician in ministering to those persons who are both indigent and ill? The health worker tends to see this as problem of disease, the social worker as problem of economic and social disorder. Each view is right and each is incomplete, and the solution does not lie in putting the two views in competition. Or consider the organization of metropolitan planning, in which health has so large stake, but there are so many other stakes as well; or the methods of arriving at an appropriate balance between the boon of atomic energy and the dangers that it poses to the future of mankind. One could multiply these examples over and over again. Of all the professions with which health workers must deal, the law is undoubtedly the most pervasive. The law not only constitutes the structural framework of the whole of our organized society including our multitude of governments, but it provides those rules or norms of conduct to which society expects adherence and the means of colmpelling adherence when that is necessary. Every governmental agency is created and its authority deifined by law, and every administrative regulation and every expenditure of public funds must be authorized by law. Practitioners are licensed and institutions chartered and their authority fixed Mr. Willcox is general counsel of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.