312 THE POPULAR SCIEJSCE MONTHLY. 



earnestness of any individual or community in reference to any 

 subject is a willingness to spend money in the furtherance of it," 

 and the five hundred dollars that was to be spent in 1849, in find- 

 ing out whether the State had best do anything toward public 

 hygiene, and the $62,876.82 that was spent in 1893 for expert 

 work by her trained corps of sanitarians, are capital indices of 

 the contrasting condition of public opinion at the two periods. 



Knowledge and light can not be fenced in or shut out, and the 

 example set in the early home of the Puritans saw its first an- 

 swering spark on the Pacific coast. It was only two decades 

 since the irruption of the Forty-niners when California, in 1870, 

 established her State Board, " in order to remain on the level of 

 other intelligent people in other States." Her influential citizens 

 had gone from the East as grown men, and some of them had 

 been disciples of Lemuel Shattuck in Boston. Some of our young 

 States have made astonishing advances, because not hampered 

 with a set of conservative obstructionists, and when once started 

 on the track of progress have shown a fruitful activity quite over- 

 shadowing the action of older communities. In the very next 

 year Minnesota established a State Board, and thus a nucleus for 

 the growing work of preventive medicine was planted on the four 

 borders of the land, that at New Orleans being the most palpable 

 and obvious, as the quarantining and disinfecting and fumigat- 

 ing of yellow fever, is a much more perceptible process than the 

 noiseless but sure elimination of malarial fever from Maryland 

 by extensive sanitary underdraining. 



Two of the men who had investigated the Maplewood fever 

 were professors in the medical college at Ann Arbor. They were 

 indefatigable in efforts to influence the Legislature, and did not 

 rest till Michigan had a State Board of Health, with Dr. Henry B. 

 Baker as its secretary an enthusiastic knight of sanitary science, 

 possessed of a phenomenal ingenuity in popularizing its study 

 among the million, and in making its work valuable. The work 

 it has done in reducing the death-rate from scarlatina, diphtheria, 

 and smallpox is a true nineteenth-century miracle. 



Maryland and the District of Columbia followed in 1874, Mis- 

 sissippi in 1875, and Tennessee in 1877. It required eight years 

 to get ten boards, and when we scan the legislation that gave 

 them being, and see how little money was given them to work 

 with scarcely enough to pay necessary postage on the letters 

 that must pass before any rapport could be established between 

 the central authority and- the separate municipalities it is ap- 

 parent that the public mind was far from convinced as to their 

 utility, and the public heart was by no means " fired " with zeal 

 to aid their work. A pathetic story attaches to the North Caro- 

 lina Board. Dr. Thomas F. Wood one of those patient, self- 



