COMPULSORY NOTIFICATION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 
829 
has had time to dry. If a handkerchief is used it should be put in 
boiling water or strong disinfectant before the expectoration can dry 
and be shaken off. 
Consumptives should sleep alone, certainly in a separate bed, and 
best in a separate room. 
Another matter for consideration is the travelling of consumptives 
on steamers. I am sure thorough disinfection of all berths and cabins 
used by such passengers should be rigidly enforced. 
It was suggested that the paper should have special reference to 
bovine tuberculosis. I think others will give you information in this 
respect much more valuable ; and I am also of opinion that the really 
important aspect of the question is the human tuberculosis, for it 
appears to me much more harm and contagion spreads from man to 
man than from animal to man. I am subject to your correction, but, 
if I am right in this view, I think and hope this little paper of mine 
will not he without good if it helps to further ventilate the subject 
of necessary measures to prevent the spread of tuberculosis between 
human beings. 
7.— COMPULSORY NOTIFICATION OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 
« By WILTON LO VE, ALB. 
The health of a community is the most important factor towards 
the well-being of that community at large and of the individual units 
composing it. 
To the various governing bodies and to the medical profession is 
entrusted the preservation of the public health — the former by their 
enactments instituting and enforcing the various means which 
experience and science have shown to be best adapted to that end; the 
latter in its dual preventive and remedial capacity. 
Marked as have been the strides of the healing art during the 
past quarter of a century, the growth in importance of sanitary 
science or preventive medicine has been hardly less marked, and 
must inevitably expand almost indefinitely as the importance of the 
subject becomes so completely recognised as to compel recognition 
from those to whose hands legislative powers have been entrusted. 
The Registrar-General for Great Britain shows bow sanitary 
science and preventive medicine, working band in hand with increased 
knowledge of disease and its successful treatment, have reduced the 
death-rate. 
In the latter half of the last century, from what imperfect records 
exist, we estimate that the death-rate of London must have been at 
least 70 per 1,000 per annum — an appalling figure to us nowadays. 
The death-rate of London in 1838 was 23 5. The death-rate from 
1838-70 was 22*4, an average on a continual decrease during that 
period. The mortality for the decade 1871-80 was 21*7, which is 
lower than in any preceding decennium since civil registration began. 
This diminuendo scale has also been maintained in the years following 
1880 — e.g.) in 1883 it was 19*5 ; 1884, 19 6 ; 1886, 19 ; or an average 
mean death-rate of 19*3 for the first half of the last decade. To put 
it in another way : The old Norwich life table, based on tlie mortality of 
1838-1854, gave the mean expectation of life for males 39*6, for females 
