78 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



Lodging Houses in Paris ";^^'' "Paris Water Supply." ^^'^ Other 

 "foreign gleanings," as, for examples, on "Cholera in Egypt," 

 " Cholera in Calcutta," and " Preventable Disease in Ireland," 

 were prepared and submitted by him. These show that his sources 

 were official health officer reports, the Journal d'Hygiene of Paris, 

 hygienic society bulletins, and government publications. In Octo- 

 ber, 1883, he purchased Littre's Dktionaire de la Langue Frangaise, 

 a five volume work of about 5,000 closely printed pages, and he 

 had decided to devote the year 1884 to the reading of German, 

 the while continuing his reading of French both by way of scien- 

 tific publications and a study of Pierre Etienne Duchartre's 

 Elements de Botanique. 



Smith found learning the German language " a very great task." 

 " It will take me a year or two more at the very least," he told his 

 mother in a letter of March 15, 1884, " and I have been working 

 faithfully for fully as long as this. I now recite, or rather read, 

 once a week to a German minister, who gives me excellent instruc- 

 tion." And in this letter he expressed his happiness in his work. 



The more I learn of public health work, the more cordially do I find 

 myself in sympathy with it. There is no question but that this Board in 

 the past ten years of its existence has saved this State in sickness and death, 

 by its active efforts in the prevention of the spread of communicable 

 diseases alone, a hundred times more than all it has cost. I had the same 

 impression before I entered this Office, but did not then have as great 

 familiarity with the facts as I now have. 



In a letter to Professor Volney Morgan Spalding of the Uni- 

 versity of Michigan, he disclosed he was reading Goethe's 

 " Faust " with much pleasure but planned to be soon at his botani- 

 cal studies again in real earnestness. Liberty Hyde Bailey, junior, 

 was then an assistant at the Gray Herbarium of Harvard Univer- 

 sity. He was assistant curator of the herbarium, in entire charge 

 of the nomenclature of the botanic gardens and greenhouses and 

 of the students' and garden herbaria, and assistant in physiological 

 experiments. Smith's letter of April 18 to him asked how Das 

 Botanische Centralblatt compared 



28-29, where a copy of Smith's translation, Cholera in Damietta, has been set 

 forth almost in full. 



^^^ Sanitary News 3 (26): 22, Nov. 15, 1883. 



^^Udem, 23. 



