reported to the central authority in 1892, which proves that at least sixteen hundred and thirty persons are not asleep. The secretary wrote three thousand one hundred and fifty-three letters on subjects ranging from glanders and leprosy to vital statistics.
Says the secretary of Kentucky, "The growth of sanitary work in public confidence has been very marked, especially in the last three or four years."
The capital of our country presents a very perfect object lesson of what thorough sanitation is; it formerly was bad, as bad could be.
Progressive physicians early perceived the trend of preventive medicine, and also the advantage of a free interchange of ideas, and have now been formed into the American Public Health Association twenty-one years, through which Mexico, Canada, and the United States form a sanitary solidarity.
In 1879 the Sanitary Council of the Mississippi Valley was formed, and the struggle that the Nestor of sanitarians. Dr. J. H. Ranch, and Dr. Holt, had with the authorities of Louisiana to prevent concealment and dissimulation makes a lively and interesting story; but for twelve years there has been practically no yellow fever in New Orleans (since 1880), and the commercial value of the services of that council are immense, while there is no measuring the confidence inspired in millions of minds, that they will surely keep the fever or the cholera out.
Incidentally the new profession of sanitary engineer has come into being, and an immense amount of sanitary literature has accumulated. What of the future? The best sign of the times we have kept for the last: women are actually becoming interested in practical sanitation, and large classes of them have paid money to be instructed in it in Boston lately. The movement of these public bodies is important but extraneous; this feminine interest is vital and interstitial, and under woman's influence we look to see the physical life made doubly worth the living.
A hundred years ago to-day Jenner alone knew the secret of the means by which smallpox was to be virtually banished. Now hundreds of people know the precise conditions under which a successful crusade of extermination against consumption can be conducted. Is it too much to hope that fifty years will see it driven out from among civilized peoples?
