PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS — SECTION I. 
179 
the physical basis. The trouble is that we find the moral sense 
unprovided with any set of trainable scouts. Fortunately, however, the 
law of association is as potent here as in the physical and intellectual. 
And, in view of the unsatisfactory condition of this factor in healthy 
life, there seems special need for emphasising the scientific view that 
for its well-being we must pay increasing attention to the physical 
concomitants, and bring the influence of association to bear as much 
as possible upon the development of what appear to be the basement 
ideas — self-mastery, reverence, and regard for the rights of others. 
But who finds place for these in a modern curriculum ? 
But man exists not only as au individual but also as a member of 
a community, and it is in this category that we can deal with him from 
the standpoint of environment. 
The public health, in which man shares, is essentially the province 
of the hygienist, and as such has received an amount of observation, 
research, and registration, that can scarcely be equalled in any other 
branch of science. It has formed health departments in the State, 
shaped legislative enactments, created vast congresses, and become 
part of the literature of the day. Its ramifications and attempts 
would surprise anyone not specially cognisant of the subject. Thus 
think of the sections into which the Hygiene Congress of 1891, for 
example, was divided : Preventive medicine, bacteriology, relation 
of diseases of animals to those of man; infancy, childhood, and 
school life; architectural, engineering, naval and military hygiene, 
State hygiene, demography, health statistics, and industrial hygiene ; 
As a contribution from science to health, this surely establishes a 
vionumentum cere perennius . W ould you have summarised some 
of the results already achieved? Then ponder over the following 
table, quoted by Sir Joseph Fayrer, the President of that Congress: — 
Years. Death Rate per Thousand. 
1816—1855 24*9 
1866 — 1870 22 4 
1870—1875 209 
1875—1880 200 
1880—1885 19-3 
1885—1888 ... 18*7 
1889 17-85 
In some parts of England, he add 
recoverv or the maintenance of 
where 
the 
main object is the 
ite is down to 9 per 
health, the death ra 
1,000. And, as instancing the way in which science has come to regard 
disease, I know nothing better than the standards mentioned by 
Surgeon Billings at the Berlin Medical Congress of 1890. He there takes 
the statistics of smallpox as the test of the administrative efficiency 
of vaccination ; those of typhoid fever, cholera, and dysentery as 
indicative of the character of the water supply ; pulmonary phthisis, 
pneumonia, acute bronchitis, and tonsilitis as measuring defective and 
impure air supply ; and scurvy, alcoholism, diabetes, and rheumatism 
as illustrating defective assimilation from improper diet, imprudent 
indulgence, or exposure. 
Perhaps in no department of public health has the influence of 
science been so marked and valuable as in that of infectious diseases. 
To science we owe the discovery of the true causes of pathogenic 
