... This is the talk that Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush — a lady who is among those who have treated this subject — prepared for Radio Lebanon on the occasion of World Health Day. The censor's office, however, barred her from broadcasting it as it stood, and insisted on cutting out certain of its paragraphs — which led our speaker to decline to broadcast it at all...

Will our honored readers help us search out whatever there is in this talk that offends the dignity of Lebanon or blackens its reputation?!

On the seventh of April of every year, the peoples of the earth and their governments celebrate World Health Day — the day on which the member states ratified the constitution of the World Health Organization, one of the organizations attached to the Economic and Social Council; this took place in Geneva in 1948.

The Organization's constitution contains the broad-est and most complete definition of the standard of health that the human race has known from the beginning of creation down to our own day. For it states that "health is a person's enjoyment of his full mental and physical powers, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity," and that "the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, or economic and social condition."

Inspired by the principles set down in its constitu-tion, the Organization considers that the health of all peoples is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security, and that its achievement depends on the fullest possible cooperation of the efforts of indi-viduals and governments; that upon governments falls the responsibility for the health of their peoples — a responsibility that can be discharged only by providing adequate health and social measures; and that whatever any government does to improve health and preserve it is of value to all.

With such lofty aims did the human race confront itself at the opening of the second half of the twentieth century, and with them it turned toward its world, to lighten somewhat the heaps of misery and pain that have accompanied infirmity and disease throughout the generations.

This modern tendency — indeed this comprehensive philosophical outlook, which sees in a properly provided standard of health a fundamental right of every human being, a first condition of peace, and one of the duties of the state — is proof of our deep feeling of a pressing need calling us to be freed from the fears of disease; for disease is the companion of

ignorance and want, the enemy of well-being, and the enemy of all progress and advancement.

The defining of this new current of thought in the manner set forth in the Organization's constitution is the result of collective labor, shared in by the member states that answered the invitation of the Secretariat-General of the United Nations to take part in the World Health Conference held in New York City in the summer of 1946.

Among the delegates of the member states were three groups. One group represented the advanced nations, which had embraced these principles and striven to apply them before the United Nations Organization existed. A second group felt the nobility of the mission which the countries marching forward in the procession of civilization had pre-ceded it in fulfilling, and so took part in the World Health Conference hoping, out of a desire to learn, to borrow the methods that would help it undertake a similar attempt, for the good of its people and the well-being of its individuals. And a third group was, up to the date of the conference, still a stranger to this outlook, because its leaders of thought had been slow to awaken to the importance of the standard of health, its relation to social and economic condi-tions, and its connection with collective safety and the general good. This group falls, in the classifica-tion now current, under the heading of the countries retarded in their social growth, or the countries lagging behind the procession of civilization.

The Lebanese may not be pleased at his belonging to this group, given his faith in his own capabilities and the nature of his land, and his pride in the progressive stride his society has made in the first half of the present century. Yet the truth of the matter, as the statistics show it and the figures define it — and in them we have the most precise and eloquent testimony — speaks contrary to what he would wish, and places him, regrettably, in the third of the groups mentioned.

If the Lebanese realized that such a standard helps others to judge that beautiful Lebanon — the Lebanon we love and whose glories we sing — is unprogressive; that it is not yet fit, in the full sense of the word, to be a home for man, or to assume the leadership of social and intellectual progress in the Arab East; and that it is unworthy of survival in view of the serious and effective contribution it could make to human civilization — he would not waste his own time,

and he would strive from this very hour, with all the energy given him, to embrace the philosophy of the