Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.
Interpretation
Hygiene intertwines with morality, often corrupting the true purpose of medicine, which is to protect from vices rather than impose virtue.
In this quote, H. L. Mencken critiques the conflation of hygiene with morality, suggesting that a focus on hygiene often implies a moral judgment about health that is not the core purpose of medicine. He argues that the true aim of medicine is to shield individuals from the negative impacts of their vices, not to enforce or dictate moral behavior, thus highlighting the tension between ethical beliefs and medical practices.
In practice
In a debate about public health policies, this quote can emphasize the difference between promoting hygiene and enforcing moral standards.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.
About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
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