August 14, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



201 



Here and there municipal boards of health 

 have responded heartily to the call to public 

 health, but as a rule these boards are poorly 

 made up, poorly officered and little respect- 

 ed. Here, then, is a place where the young 

 physician can often take hold and help to 

 forward the cause. He can urge and work 

 for the establishment and support of a 

 good chemical, bacteriological and diag- 

 nostic laboratory; he can report his cases 

 of infectious disease promptly; he can ap- 

 pear before the local medical society, or 

 the local academy of arts and sciences, or 

 the local natural history society, and urge 

 upon its members the importance of clean 

 streets, pure water, fresh and clean milk, 

 tenement house inspection, and the like. 

 He can even write to the newspapers, with- 

 out fear of any breach of professional 

 ethics, advocating these reforms. The 

 medical man who advertises himself is more 

 obnoxious to-day than ever before ; but the 

 man who writes to the papers and has some- 

 thing vital to say, even if he makes himself 

 known and talked about thereby, is rightly 

 held to be doing good. In this connection 

 a word should be added of hearty appre- 

 ciation of the splendid work done by the 

 Harvard Medical School in its free courses 

 of popular lectures on medical subjects, 

 given diiring the last two winters before 

 large and appreciative audiences in Boston. 

 The call to health and preventive medi- 

 cine has met with no quicker or heartier 

 response anywhere than from workers in 

 applied science and technology— engineers, 

 chemists, biologists, bacteriologists and sta- 

 tisticians. The appointment by the gover- 

 nor of Massachusetts of Mr. Hiram P. 

 Mills, a distinguished hydraulic engineer, 

 to a position on the state board of health 

 in 1886, and his election by his colleagues 

 to the chairmanship of the committee on 

 water supply and sewerage, marked a ne^^• 

 epoch in public health science, and was a 

 direct response to the call for expert leader- 



ship in the hygiene and sanitation of the 

 environment. The establishment of an en- 

 gineering division of the work of the board 

 naturally followed; and this example has 

 been imitated with success by other boards, 

 notably those of Connecticut, Ohio, Penn- 

 sylvania and New York. The fact is, as 

 I have shown on another occasion, that fuU 

 knowledge of all the numerous aspects of 

 public health science and preventive medi- 

 cine has become impossible for any one 

 man, or any one kind of man, so that vari- 

 ous kinds of experts must to-day cooperate. 

 The great municipal filtration works, which 

 to-day purify our rivers, are not built or 

 operated or even thoroughly understood by 

 medical men. They are built and operated 

 by engineers, tested and proved by bacteri- 

 ologists, and paid for by the people. 



The medical departments of the army 

 and the navy are making their own re- 

 sponses to the call to public health. The 

 magnificent work of those self-sacrificing 

 officers of the army medical corps which 

 gave us our present ideas of yellow fever 

 control, has shed renown upon the whole 

 American medical profession. And the 

 brilliant achievements of the United States 

 Public Health and Marine Hospital Serv- 

 ice, in applying these ideas and discoveries 

 to the actual suppression of the great yel- 

 low fever epidemic of 1905, have added 

 honorably and materially to that renown. 

 The more recent and remarkably efficient 

 work of this same branch of the federal 

 service in controlling the alarming out- 

 break of bubonic plague on the Pacific 

 coast deserves the highest praise. Both 

 achievements, especially when added to the 

 orderly, extensive and fruitful investiga- 

 tions constantly going forward in the Hy- 

 gienic Laboratory of the Public Health and 

 Marine Hospital Service, ought to make the 

 fact better known than it yet is, that we 

 already possess the very large and active 

 nucleus of a national board of health, pre- 



