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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Officers' Quarters. Fort Stanton. New Mexico. 



Marine Hospital Service officers for the Keveime Cutter, Coast-Survey, 

 Life-Saving and Lighthouse Services. Instruction is given, when 

 properly applied for, in methods of resuscitation of persons apparently 

 drowned. Applicants for a pilot's license are examined as to their 

 hearing, color perception and visual acuity. The total of such physical 

 examinations for the last fiscal year was 4,610. 



There are many foreign details filled by service officers besides their 

 varied and extensive activities at home. The American consulates have 

 medical officers attached in Yokohama, Habana, Guayaquil, Naples and 

 Hong Kong. Contract surgeons are kept at the principal ports of 

 China, Eussia, Japan, India, Italy, Mexico and tropical America. 

 Eight United States Revenue Cutters have a medical officer on board. 

 Through all these various and widely separated posts, information is 

 constantly being collected and collated as to health conditions all over 

 the world. This information is issued in the Public Health Bulletins 

 published weekly by the Bureau of the Public Health Service in Wash- 

 ington. Service officers are detailed to attend certain congresses and 

 conventions on scientific and medical lines, in this country and abroad, 

 and many exhibits are prepared for scientific and popular conventions, 

 of an educative nature and illustrative of the service work. 



No more important feature of national health protection can be 

 named than the quarantine service. The history of quarantine meas- 

 ures takes us back to the time of the Milanese and Lombardians, late 

 in the fourteenth century. At that period the great and lucrative Ital- 

 ian commerce had been responsible for the introduction of the black 

 plague from the Levant into Europe and terrible fear was on all the 

 people. Persons coming in with the plague were taken into the midst 

 of large fields and left alone to recover or die as best they could. The 

 penalty for disobedience of the stringent rules was death and confisca- 

 tion of the victim's property. In 1475 Venice established a Sanitary 



