Marine Hospital Service officers for the Revenue Cutter, Coast-Survey, Life-Saving and Lighthouse Services. Instruction is given, when properly applied for, in methods of resuscitation of persons apparently drowned. Applicants for a pilot's license are examined as to their hearing, color perception and visual acuity. The total of such physical examinations for the last fiscal year was 4,610.
There are many foreign details filled by service officers besides their varied and extensive activities at home. The American consulates have medical officers attached in Yokohama, Habana, Guayaquil, Naples and Hong Kong. Contract surgeons are kept at the principal ports of China, Russia, Japan, India, Italy, Mexico and tropical America. Eight United States Revenue Cutters have a medical officer on board. Through all these various and widely separated posts, information is constantly being collected and collated as to health conditions all over the world. This information is issued in the Public Health Bulletins published weekly by the Bureau of the Public Health Service in Washington. Service officers are detailed to attend certain congresses and conventions on scientific and medical lines, in this country and abroad, and many exhibits are prepared for scientific and popular conventions, of an educative nature and illustrative of the service work.
No more important feature of national health protection can be named than the quarantine service. The history of quarantine measures takes us back to the time of the Milanese and Lombardians, late in the fourteenth century. At that period the great and lucrative Italian commerce had been responsible for the introduction of the black plague from the Levant into Europe and terrible fear was on all the people. Persons coming in with the plague were taken into the midst of large fields and left alone to recover or die as best they could. The penalty for disobedience of the stringent rules was death and confiscation of the victim's property. In 1475 Venice established a Sanitary
