said, twenty-seven years after, "This magnificent report fell flat from the printer's hands, but when in 1869 the State Board was established it was on the lines Mr. Shattuck had drawn." He did not live to see it carried into effect, but while he lived he never ceased to strive to bring the people of his State to correct views; and now that a great majority of the States have modeled their boards on that of Massachusetts, we can see that he did not labor in vain.
Meantime not all the rest of the country was asleep, for very earnest efforts were making in New York city looking toward the establishment of a central health authority. There was need enough of it, as these facts show: twenty thousand people were living in cellars; there were spots from which typhus was never absent; there were no less than three hundred and seventeen slaughterhouses with their inevitable fat-rendering and bone-boiling concomitants below Eightieth Street; and there is a credible witness now living who saw a small child killed in Madison Street, by one of the hogs which formerly ran loose in the city. It took fifteen years of effort, on the part of a set of men whose disinterested devotion to the best interests of humanity is beyond praise, before, in 1860, they secured a Board of Health for the city. Repeated decimating invasions of yellow fever had visited New Orleans, and in 1855 the Legislature of Louisiana passed a law for the establishment of quarantine, that involved the spending of much money; its authority was vested in a State Board of Health, and its powers were much enlarged in 1867. It was, no doubt, a valuable instrument with which to repel the invasion of exotic epidemics, but bore little resemblance to the thirty-seven State Boards of Health that have since come into being. The one was a frantic effort to repel an external enemy; the others direct their main efforts to the correction of internal sanitary sins of omission and commission. These, with their vigilant watchers in every hamlet, and their multipled publications of reports, pamphlets, directions, and leaflets—the true leaves that are for the healing of the nations—constitute a bureau of information that has saved thousands and thousands of lives. While Lemuel Shattuck's splendid programme of action was calmly slumbering in the State Library the war came, and all minor issues were swallowed up in the one "Shall we have a country left?" But even this had its compensations. Dr. H. I. Bowditch truly says, "Both North and South discovered the all important advantages of cleanliness, sobriety, and strict methods of action, as opposed to the distress consequent on filth, intemperance, and chaotic rule." Dr. Bowditch himself, by the most persistent efforts, induced our military authorities to provide comfortable ambulances for the wounded, and from them has
