Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/333

Rh that led to the abolition of the board. Nashville, Tenn., in 1878, made enlightened preparations under the leadership of Dr. J. D. Plunket, and, though there were twenty-four cases, either coming from other places or originating there, they were restricted, cared for in a hospital made ready, and the business of the city went on with no interruption; but there was concentrated authority at the center of things.

The large southern and western States—each of which is a sort of empire—have organized their work largely by counties, each of which has a board that reports to the central State Board, and they are doing a valuable work in the collection and collation of vital statistics—a work in which our country lags far behind European lands. Should our Congress see fit to create the Bureau of Public Health within the Department of the Interior, now asked for by the New York Academy of Medicine, and all sensible sanitary bodies everywhere, it would be bringing our country into step with other progressive peoples. Dr. Abbott, of Massachusetts, made a plea before the Sanitary Congress at Chicago for a national registration. Is not a numbering of the people, and an account of their sicknesses and deaths, of as much importance as the acreage of wheat or corn, and the number of acres that have been destroyed by weevils or fungi? It would seem that a central authority can better fence out those contagious diseases that pay no attention to State lines, than one diffused among a number of organizations, even though each one has its inalienable State rights.

The scientific and safe sanitation of the Columbian Fair grounds in Chicago, and the direct reduction of the typhoid-fever rate there from the hour when water from the contaminated intakes was shut off, and the new four-mile tunnel began to be used, is a distinct triumph of the science of sanitation.

The thirty-seven boards have very different phases of sanitary and hygienic errors brought to their attention, and naturally each attacks the evil that is most importunate in his section, and the result is that there is no detail of the house—its site, its material, construction, plumbing, heating, lighting, or ventilation—that is not exhaustively discussed by some competent mind; nothing pertaining to the hygiene of the individual escapes them, from protecting the newly born from blindness, up through all the perils of youth, middle life, and age, till at last he finds sanitary sepulture at the hands of a funeral director who has been carefully taught by his State board how to conduct the entombment of those who have died of the most virulent infections with perfect safety to the living. The frauds and adulterations in foods