TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE. 317 



either is potential murder, and is coming to be so regarded ; and 

 the next touches the sphere of the affections, as it has saved thou- 

 sands and thousands of lives, as a long catalogue of diminished 

 death-rates testifies. At the World's Fair Dr. Abbott had pre- 

 pared a series of sanitary maps of Massachusetts, exhibiting the 

 comparative ravages of the communicable diseases. The towns 

 most deeply stricken by them were colored a bright carmine, and, 

 by different patterns of cross-hatchings, the greater or lesser prev- 

 alence was indicated by lighter and lighter shadings, till at last 

 one or two happy localities were left a pure white. In the map of 

 Typhoid Fever one was instantly struck with the deeper dye of 

 the rural districts, while for a radius of a hundred miles around 

 Boston hardly a town showed more than a mild pink, and the 

 general effect changed the whole aspect of that half of the State. 

 The reason is not far to seek. The perpetual exhortations to "get 

 pure water" have so moved the people that perhaps there is more 

 " piped " water in that section than in any other equal area in the 

 United States, a fact that takes on fresh significance when we con- 

 sider that there is a population of two hundred and seventy-five 

 persons to the square mile, and that parts of it have been lived in 

 more than two centuries and a half. Such conditions call for 

 much more vigilant supervision than " out west," where one per- 

 son to the square mile lives on fresh, uncontaminated soil. That 

 lighter shading means that to-day thousands of young men and 

 women are " breathing this sweet air of life " who, but for the 

 action that led up to it, and all it means, would be filling untimelj'' 

 graves. 



The whole subject of vaccination, revaccination, and the es- 

 tablishment of vaccine stations where pure, active, and fresh 

 bovine lymph is produced, has been so frequently and thoroughly 

 discussed and acted upon by the several boards, that it is strange 

 that any intelligent person should allow himself or his familj^ to 

 remain for a day unvaccinated. Still, in Minnesota seventy per 

 cent of the school children are not vaccinated, and the knowledge 

 of this fact so moved the State Board, that they at once established 

 a station for the production of a safe virus. In Massachusetts, in 

 the epidemic of 1873, there were five thousand six hundred and 

 six cases of it, and in one year since there were but two. Self- 

 interest has protected the State from the evil result of the incur- 

 sion of unvaccinated French Canadians, for they are not allowed 

 to go to work in the factories till after they show the vaccination 

 certificate. In Rhode Island general gratuitous vaccination and 

 the compulsory vaccination of school children have reduced the 

 mortality to one twentieth of what it was, though this is a manu- 

 facturing State, subject to the irruption of hordes of the unvac- 

 cinated. 



