424 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sources of information — you may hear such people, I say, maintaining 

 that, after all, the emanations of the cesspool are rather conducive to 

 health than to disease ; that their fathers lived and throve in such an 

 atmosphere, and that, therefore, it has a healthy influence. I can 

 point you to an exceedingly pleasant village which I have sometimes 

 to visit, where, with a plentiful supply of water, there is an absolute 

 want of any system of sewerage. Typhoid and typhus go zigzag 

 through that town every year or two, making victims, yet you can't 

 induce the people of that village to believe that their unsewered con- 

 dition has any thing to do with it. 



But it is not merely in the country districts that this state of things 

 has existed. Up to a very recent period at least this same ignorance was 

 manifested in a very surprising degree in this metropolis. It is now about 

 five years since, with two other members of our State Senate, I visited 

 this city, and sat in the Commission for examining into certain branches 

 of the city administration, and especially into the conduct of that 

 branch which had the care of the public health. The state of things 

 revealed was such as could only exist under a great and wide-spread 

 ignorance on the part of citizens of the first principles of Sanitary 

 Scfence. To give an idea of this ignorance, let me recall, as nearly as 

 I can, a little episode in the investigation : It happened that the late 

 Judge Whiting, who had charge of the investigation on the part of the 

 Citizens' Association, put on the stand a young physician, who testified 

 that the Health Officers, or Wardens, or Inspectors, were men utterly 

 ignorant of the first principles relating to the public health which 

 they were appointed to preserve. In order to refute this, the head of 

 the Health Department at the time brought on the stand, in perfect good 

 faith, several of these Health Officers. Toward the close of the exam- 

 ination of the first (one) of these gentlemen, Judge Whiting asked 

 this question : " Did you have a case of small-pox in your ward ? " 

 and he answered, "Yes, sir." Judge Whiting: "Did you visit the 

 patient?" Witness: "No, sir." Judge Whiting: "Why not?" 

 Witness : " For the same reason that you would not ; that I was afraid 

 of taking it myself." Judge Whiting : " Did the family have any 

 care ? " Witness : " Yes, sir ; they were ' highjinnicks ' (hygienics) ; 

 they doctored themselves." As the other witnesses came in, Judge 

 Whiting used this as a sort of test question — as a sort of key to un- 

 lock the system, and show the utter ignorance that prevailed in every 

 department of it. Every witness was asked : " Well, have you any 

 'highjinnicks' in your ward?" Some of the witnesses thought they 

 had; some thought they had not; some thought they "had them 

 pretty badly ; " some thought they had them in some parts of the 

 ward, some thought they had them in other parts of the ward. At 

 last the Judge asked a witness, who had been answering his ques- 

 tion in this way: "Do you know what the word 'highjinnicks' 

 means ? " and he replied : " Yes, sir, I do ; it means a bad smell aris- 



