472 
F. S. BILLIJSTGrS. 
must be untiring until we tind the raison dl etre , and, if possible, 
means to prevent the same; it should never be forgotton that we 
may often finds means of prevention, when we cannot isolate as 
a specific element the true cause. See variola—“ small-pox.” 
These accumulative statistics seem to shock the people and help 
us to attain means for their study and prevention, but they are of 
little comparative value with reference to ontogenetic invasions, 
because of the very little attention which collateral circumstances 
and influences receive at such times, from otherwise careful and 
competent observers ; hence it is that a Board of Health, with 
authority to detail one of its members or several thoroughly com¬ 
petent men to go to a named locality and study the genesis of a 
named invasion, and another party to study and experiment on its 
treatment, may do work of untold value to the nation, because in 
the one case the persons at work have nothing to do with deaths 
taking place around them, and in the other can bend all their 
energies to the treatment of the same; the one party to prevent 
the disease generating, the other to stop its course after having 
generated. In both cases the work would be organized, not spon¬ 
taneous. 
There is another form of statistics, the careful collection of 
which would send a thrill of horror over the human family, and 
it is from this form which we may in the distant future expect 
very valuable results; but to obtain them we need far better 
practitioners, much less unprejudiced thinkers, than we now have 
in the medical profession. We allude to statistics with regard to 
the preventible diseases of life ; the diseases due to ignorance , 
not only on the p> art of the diseased but of the practitioner as well; 
an ignorance of duty with reference to the latter , for the medical 
adviser who treats only is only fit for confinement among idiots . 
We allude to the diseases due to the ignorance of the people in the 
employment of empirics, and still f urther to the still more ignorant 
American craze , the use of those disgraces of our civilization , 
legalized patent life destroyers , discoveries of the devil and 
his agents—patent medicines. Here is a crying evil to which 
the National Board of Health should give its urgent attention. 
In fact no medicines should be patented at all, nor should bottled 
