Question: All right. I kinda have two questions. The first question, he asked for me [earlier]. I got the answer.

The second question is, I found this book called The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, translated by Fabré D'Olivet (Napoleon put him in jail, so I thought he was probably a good guy). I asked everybody what they could tell me anything about the book.

And the other question I had is from the guy that introduced me to the organization. He's wondering what we're going to do about our health. Because, in his words, he says, "Knowing what we know, and doing what we do isn't enough. We have to outlive the bastards." So, what are we going to do?

LaRouche: Well, let's take the health first, and Pythagoras second.

Well, you know what I said the other day, on the 22nd, and I meant it: There's no fixed recipe for health. We have a health policy. Now health policy has two aspects. First of all sanitation, that's the first issue with health. Because in the history of mankind, the great increase and improvement in life expectancy of the population, is largely a result, not of medical practice as such, but improved sanitation. If food is not rotten, if water is not polluted, if you control the insect life around you--disease-bearing insects and so forth, keep the mosquitoes down; if you use DDT where you should, then people are going to live longer--without even going to the doctor.

But, the other side, essentially, is having a policy of developing health care. The best model we had, was the experience we had from military medicine, which various nations developed. This goes back to the medieval period, to Ambroise Paré, and so forth--surgery in warfare.

So, that we developed through experience, especially in warfare, and effects of warfare, we developed a conception of a medical health-care system, which was largely based on surgery and other things. And during the recent large wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries, we developed a military system of the type--for example, we had 16-17 million people in the U.S., in military service during the Second World War. We had a very large health-care system, as part of the military, and adjuncts to it. We used to have a Veterans Hospital system, which doesn't really function any more. So, we had to care for everything.

Now, most of the casualties in warfare, are not combat casualties. They are of a nature called "frictional": jeep drivers, airplane crashes, infections, diseases. I once faced, in Burma, where there was an epidemic of what was called "tsutsugamushi," Japanese bush typhus. And, people would get it in the bushes. The Japanese had picked it up in Southeast Asia, brought it into this area in northern Burma. They deposited it among the lice, and the lice, when they get a hold of a GI or somebody else would bite him, and that person would get this tsutsugamushi --in seven days, they're dead. Now, we can control it; we couldn't control it then.

So, these were the kinds of problems. We had amoebic dysentery; we had a whole epidemic of amoebic dysentery in northern Burma. So, these kinds of problems are typical problems--.

Or, we had tiger scratches. We had a battalion, a quartermaster's battalion, which used to drive goods down from Ledo, down the Ledo Road down to Myitkina, where we had two airfields and a lot of institutions. They would park midway along the road, where they had a camp, which was largely just a tarp and canvas shack kind of camp. And this quartermaster division was sleeping in the camp, and a tiger got in there, and killed a few, and scratched up a lot the rest. We never found the exact tiger, because what happened: You had a whole quartermaster division, which was carrying some 45 caliber submachine guns there. They broke out the 45 caliber machine guns, loaded them, and went out in the bushes en masse, looking for a tiger. They got a tiger--there was nothing left for him to scratch after they got through shooting it! But, we had then hospital cases of people with osteomyelitis, from tiger scratches which cut through to the periostium of the bone of people, and that was really quite a serious operation.

So, in military medicine, just to illustrate the point, we had a broad experience of how to treat a population, not only from wartime casualties, which applies to--the same thing as accidents, so-called trauma cases; accidents on the street, emergency cases--same thing.

So, we had a system. At the end of the war, we had an act which was put through rather quickly, the Hill-Burton Act; which was a few pages, not some kind of Hillary Clinton nightmare, but a few sensible pages, that worked. And we rebuilt our health-care system around fixed-point institutions--hospitals, clinics, and so forth--on the basis of assigning a goal for health care to each county of the United States. Now, this goal would change every year, because the Federal act said, "We'll have this." So, we would have private hospitals, public hospitals, public institutions, would all get together; they would decide how many beds of what type and what kind of care they would provide for that entire community, for the coming year, or for the advance year; they would then find out how much money they would have, from various sources, and then go out and raise more, so-called "special fundraising."

So, they would operate on that basis, so if somebody fell down in the street, whether they had any money or not; someone says, "Call a cop!" They'd take him to the nearest emergency ward. They'd get immediate trauma treatment; then assigned to some permanent care, if they need it, wherever it's needed, wherever it's available. And then, maybe a couple of days later, somebody comes through, and says, "You got any resources to pay for all this?" or "Who's going to pay for it?" And if they didn't have any money, we'd pay for it anyway. Wouldn't even bother paying for it; we didn't call it pay. We didn't have to have an individual payment system. People would pay what they could, and we would have a slop factor, of people who couldn't pay, or couldn't pay completely, and they would be cared for, as if they had all the money in the world. That was the system.

You combine that kind of system, with what's called a teaching hospital, where doctors and nurses are trained, and given education. Teaching hospitals are generally located in the center of population areas--usually; and they're places where, in the process of teaching, as well as practicing medicine in these hospitals, all kinds of capabilities and problems are raised. For example, D.C. General Hospital was a public hospital, full-service capability, research capabilities. You were lucky to get to D.C. General; if you had a problem, you'd be treated. They had the research capabilities, some of the most advanced capabilities in the world, in this poor, run-down institution.

So therefore, what we have is, two things: We have advanced research, advanced research in medical care, in health care, should be based on these kinds of institutions, including a Public Health Service, with research institutions; defining problems as they're arising; discovering better ways to deal with these kinds of problems; pushing for cures, in relevant cases; and more advanced forms of treatment.

So, what we need is a system, which is a general welfare system. We are committed to the general health of the population; welfare and human care. Human care, not just care of a piece of flesh, but human care. And therefore, we have to keep working at it, as improving it.

So, the only way we're going to deal with this, because of the nature of the problem, is to have a health-care system, under which all the facilities required are integrated, including research universities and so forth. Each get their relationship to this process. So, you have a national system, in which problems, as they arise, you can mobilize this system, to respond to a problem. And, you have to have reserve capability built in for catastrophes, at the same time.

That will define where we can go with health care.

For example, you have this stem-cell research business, which is becoming actively more discussed. It's relevant. It should be done, the research should be done. Some of the crazy things, about making clones and things, forget that. But, the research about the relationship, what the stem cell nature is, what its relationship is to rehabilitation of damaged tissue, injured tissue, this is a relevant question. How to acquire the stem cells, from the person themselves; you want the person's own stem cells; you want to find them in them, someplace, and use them in the culture of those stem cells; and inject them back in them, and hope that this somehow will be successful. We need that research. So, that's the frontier.

The other aspect of this, is our attitude toward the person. Not just the health care of the physical person, but the attitude toward the person. In most of these cases, there are sociological-emotional problems, which come up, especially with severe health problems. And therefore, the care of the person as a person, regard for the person is sometimes as important as the actual physical treatment of the disease. So, we need a system that thinks that way, and functions that way.

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