HEALTH-MATTERS IN JAPAN. 281 



infectious character when communicating with water-supplies, or 

 through its malarial gases affecting the air of houses. At present the 

 causes of high death-rates are as certainly known as the course of 

 storms. Indeed, the intelligent physician will predict the necessary 

 consequences which must ensue from the presence in a crowded city 

 of matter which should be removed. Interested as I have been in 

 these subjects, I looked forward with considerable eagerness to an 

 opportunity for studying the conditions which obtain among the 

 Japanese concerning these matters. Their manner of living, their 

 food, their domestic habits, are all so different from ours, that it nat- 

 urally occurred to me, if these filth-diseases are as common here, with 

 their cleanly habits, and the universal custom of removing offal from 

 their dwellings, as with us where the same matter lies in a frightful 

 state for months to pollute the neighborhood, then the points urged 

 in regard to the relations between filth-diseases and offal must be 

 modified or abandoned. 



What do the facts show ? 



At home, the following conditions are rightly looked upon as 

 grave sources of danger : the presence of privies in the vicinity of 

 wells, cellars filled with decaying vegetable matter, a water-closet or 

 privy connected immediately with a house, or the ingress of sewage- 

 gas to a house. It is at present difficult to get any vital statistics 

 regarding the Japanese. While the Government and people have 

 made the most surprising strides toward the civilization of Western 

 nations (for they have a civilization of their own which in many re- 

 spects is far ahead of ours '), and have established normal schools and 

 universities, medical and naval colleges, hydrographic and other sur- 

 veys, they have not yet seen the importance of organizing a board of 

 health. 2 



One would be justified in assuming that if these sources of danger 

 existed, the foreigner, unacclimated as he is, would be more suscep- 

 tible to their influence than the native. Dr. Stuart Eldridge, of Yo- 

 kohama, a distinguished physician, who has had a long and varied 

 experience in this country in hospital-work and as an active practi- 

 tioner, has kindly furnished me with the following data at my re- 

 quest : " Scarlet fever almost unknown, never epidemic. Diphthe- 

 ria almost unknown, never epidemic. Severer forms of bowel-dis- 

 ease, such as dysentery and chronic diarrhoea, very rare. Mala- 



1 If some of the indications of civilization are to treat each other kindly, to treat their 

 children with unvarying kindness, to treat the animals below them with tenderness, to 

 honor their father and mother, to be scrupulously clean in their persons, to be frugal and 

 temperate in their habits if these features be recognized as civilized, then this pagan 

 nation in these respects is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of the Tierra del Fuegans. 



8 We ought not to expect this of Japan, perhaps, since the representatives sent by 

 Maine to her Legislature were, with few exceptions, too ignorant to appreciate the neces- 

 sity of a State board of health, and were incredulous that the physicians who urged the 

 measure so strongly were unselfishly working for its establishment ! 



