PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 1021 
of Public Health administration may secure. The fact is we have 
had no experience of such a system. We must turn for data to 
older communities which are in advance of us, and no country has 
led the van more than England. Ata meeting in June last in 
the Guildhall, London, (Dr.) Sir Richard Thorne, summarised the 
position in a very able and remarkable address. Referring to the 
danger of unduly exalting the achievements of Public Hygiene, 
in which he himself had had a leading hand, he said “ What do 
others say of us? A few years ago a disting uished Frenchman, 
M. Henri Monod, Director of Public Health in the Ministry of 
the Interior in ene impressed by the waste of life in his own 
country, set himself to study the results of English Sanitary 
Administration, and he showed that if during the ten years 1880— 
1889 our death-rate had remained the same as it stood before that 
date, we should have lost over 800,000 lives during those ten 
years. For the purposes of this eventful gathering, I have 
brought these French studies up to current date, and I find that 
if they are carried to the end of 1895, the saving of human life 
since 1880 amounts to close upon 1,500,000. That, I venture to 
maintain, is a grand achievement, and it was as such that it was 
submitted to a body of French experts for imitation.” He con- 
tinues ‘Is this all? Both preventible disease and death are very 
pitiless in their incidence ; they select the young and the bread- 
winners, and they wreck homes and families that were full of hope. 
Sir John Simon, once calculated there were 125,000 more deaths 
in England and Wales every year than there should be. Allow 
only ten cases of non-fatal disease for one that terminates in death, 
and we have an annual total of one and a quarter million cases of 
sickness, often involving misery, penury, and even pauperism. 
The saving of life, calculated on the basis of my French friend 
and colleague in the fifteen years ending 1895, means a saving 
during that period of 15,000,000 attacks of sickness.” He con- 
cluded by these words, suggesting the economic aspect of the 
question, ‘Surely the financial aspect of this great operation can 
be appreciated in this, the financial centre of the world.” The 
saving here referred to by Dr. Thorne has been calculated by 
others, to amount to a saving of no less a sum to England than 
£15,000,000 per annum. 
In an industrial nation every human life is an integral part of 
the nation’s wealth, and every death from preventible causes is a 
Joss in money value. The cost of the ravages of preventible 
diseases can therefore be calculated. Every colony can sum up 
its own balance-sheet. In South Australia, during 1896, there 
were 93 deaths from typhoid fever alone, in a population of 
300,000, and taking the ordinary basis of calculation for non-fatal 
cases, and even leaving out the deaths and cases of sickness of the 
non-working ages below fifteen and over fifty-five, and the typhoid 
