Section I. 

 SANITARY SCIENCE AND HYGIENE. 



ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, 

 A. MAULT. 



URBAN SANITATION. 



I. 



Ever since men gathered themselves into communities they have- 

 found that some laws or regulations were needful to preserve 

 health. Comfort and natural decency perhaps first prompted these 

 laws, but soon safety more imperatively asked for them. Even the 

 temporary camping-place of a nomadic horde would soon become 

 unbearably offensive and unhealthy if its filth and refuse were not 

 got rid of. To get rid of it from the camps of a wandering people 

 was one of the objects of the health clauses of the earliest code of 

 law that we possess : one of the objects, I say, but not the only 

 one. And it is interesting to note how farseeing and foreseeing 

 was the wisdom that prompted the sanitary provisions of the 

 Mosaic law, and based them on what are still recognised as the 

 true foundations of sanitation — cleanliness of person and of dwel- 

 ling-place, wholesomeness of food, and isolation of infectious 

 disease. 



What is needful in a camp with respect to the health of the 

 sojourners therein is still more needful in a city; but the means 

 for securing it are necessarily different in the differing circum- 

 stances of a movable and of the fixed dwelling-place of a people. 

 At first these means were very often rude, and not only inadequate, 

 but sometimes calculated rather to endanger health than to preserve 

 it. But the garnered experience of each place, on the one hand, 

 and the results of scientific research and their dissemination, on the 

 other, have, slowly at first, but much more rapidly in recent years, 

 placed matters in a more satisfactory position. 



Coincidently with the growth of knowledge of the best means 

 of safeguarding the public health, there has grown up — I think I 

 may say that there has consequently and necessarily grown up — 

 the principle of leaving less and less to private initiative and 

 control, and more and more to the management of public sanitary 

 authorities. There is therefore to-day, in all civilised countries, a 



