The general public still seems largely unaware of the cost in human lives, health, and happiness of the present toll of accidental injury and death in our society. This applies particularly to death and injury of children. Those people professionally involved in the end results-the physicians and others who see the unnecessary suffering-recognize the extent of the problem, but outside this group even the educated public displays a curious indifference. In a recent book on contemporary social problems, there is no mention of accidental injury and death throughout the whole 600-odd pages.
The reasons for this neglect and indifference to a problem whose incidence and consequences could probably be reduced are unclear. Even in the matter of automobile accidents, which kill some 50,000 persons annually in the United States and maim and injure hundreds of thousands of others, there appears to be a fatalistic acceptance which is quite extraordinary when one reflects on it. It is a great pity that all motor car accidents do not happen on the same day; perhaps the shock of seeing American highways reduced to the condition of a battlefield might dramatize the problem sufficiently for steps to be taken about controlling it.
The public's acceptance of death on the highway contrasts sharply with its responsiveness to dramas involving very rare diseases or conditions: the polio vaccine deaths of a few years ago, for example, in which, statistically speaking, the danger was infinitesimal. The debate about guncontrol legislation is another case in point. This has been dramatized by the deaths by gunfire of a small number of prominent men within a limited period, but the fact that more than 500 children lose their lives every year as a result of shootings seemed unable to generate an equal display of concern, despite the fact that ours is a society in which the child is supposed to be revered.
To Boldly Remember Where We Have Already Been
