FOREWORD
A Famous doctor has referred to this medical age as having witnessed "the passing of pills and powders." Although the patent medicine advertisements in newspapers and magazines seem to belie the remark, yet the fact remains that physicians nowadays give less medicine to their patients than formerly and pay much more attention to hygiene, diet, and occupation, both as therapeutic agents in curing disease and as factors in maintaining the individual in the best of health and at a high level of working efficiency.
Of these personal and environmental factors affecting the hygiene of life and the physical efficiency of the individual, food ranks among the first. The physician, the public health nurse, the social worker, must deal at every turn with problems of diet. These present themselves in economic form when the income of a family is so low as to make adequate nourishment difficult, even with very careful selection of foods. The problem presents itself in a medical form in the treatment of many diseased conditions: diabetes, nephritis, tuberculosis, "malnutrition," constipation, etc.
Thus the dietitian has entered the area of medical and public health service as an aid to the physician and as an agent in the curing of disease and the maintenance of health. In this capacity the dietitian has entered the hospital, the clinic, and the homes of patients. Books have been written and courses are given for the training of dietitians for such service, but to a large extent the dietitian, the physician, public health nurse, and social worker have approached the problem of diet merely from the standpoint of foods, food elements, and food values. The approach needs also to be made from the standpoint of the persons who are to be fed. The patient's food habits, his tastes, inherited or acquired, are often vital considerations because the practical question in securing results is often not what diet the person needs, but what diet he can get or will take. Knowing the technique of adapting diets to individual needs in terms of food elements, calories, mineral content, vitamines, etc., is essential knowing the technique of adapting the diet in terms of the patient's food habits and financial circumstances is no less so.
From this point of view the physician, the nurse, the social worker, and the dietitian must study people as well as dietetic technique. The contribution made by Miss Wood in this book is to the study of people in relation to diet: people, in those large groups which we call nations or races, aggregations of individuals who for historical reasons have acquired certain physical and psychological characteristics in common, and among them similar tastes and habits of diet. In the melting pot of America these food habits too often conflict rather than fuse or evaporate. The changing of food habits among adults is not an easy process, as any reader will realize if he faces radical changes in the things he habitually eats and likes. To know the characteristic foods of the foreign-born, the food flavors, food habits, of each of the chief races of immigrants found in this country, is an essential part of the knowledge which should be possessed by the physician, the public health nurse, the social worker, and the dietitian who deal with these newcomers in America.
In the present book Miss Wood opens the door to this knowledge in an interesting as well as a practical way. Her initial study, undertaken in connection with the Americanization Study supported by the Carnegie Corporation, was included as a chapter in the writer's "Immigrant Health and the Community." We owe to the courtesy of Harper & Brothers, the publishers of that volume, the privilege of reprinting a considerable portion of that material in this book, amid the very considerable additions which Miss Wood's further investigations have brought.
New York City, December 15, 1921.