State preventive medicine : the first annual address to the State Board of Health of Connecticut / by John S. Butler, President of the Board.

  • Butler, John Simpkins, 1803-1890.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: State preventive medicine : the first annual address to the State Board of Health of Connecticut / by John S. Butler, President of the Board. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    and plenty of air and water, of personal cleanliness, of the removal of filth accumulations, with badly-constructed dwellings, poor and insufficient food and clothing, all leading to their natural results in the frequent recurrence of zymotic (epidemic and contagious) dis- eases, and the unrestrained prevalence of all other forms, with a corresponding death-rate of about 1 in 23, against about 1 in 40 at the present time; the death-rate being at all times the most reliable floodmark of diseased conditions. To-day, by the establishment of government boards, and the em- ployment of able and learned men as the inspectors, full, as Dr. Bowditch says, of the enthusiasm and accuracy of modern science, England has made an immense stride towards having a perfect system of sanitary guardianship of the realm. The reports of her unrivalled system of statistical investigations enable us to measure, with a good degree of precision, what State Preventive Medicine has already accomplished there. In all the conditions above specified, especially in regard to the removal of filth, and in the recognition of the fact that the germs of vice, as well as of disease, are developed from filth, extraordinary advances have been made. Epidemics and contagious diseases have either been prevented or kept within narrow limits; some diseases have disappeared, and the frequency and fatality of others have been largely diminished. Consequently the general death-rate has fallen to a much lower figure. Of course, these conditions are not universally regarded; in many loca- tions are found over-crowded dwellings, an abundance of filth and vice, and the neglect or defiance of all sanitary law, and, conse- quently, in such places there is no diminution, but an increase of sickness and of the death-rate,—the difference in the latter between the most healthy district and the least, in the same city, varying sometimes from twelve to fifty, or even sixty in 1,000. Mr. Chadwiek* says: '-We have gained the power of reducing the sickness and death-rate of the old cities by one-third ; . . the death-rate in the old settled country districts to 16 or IV in 1,000 ; . in the new districts, with complete systems of water- supply, drainage, etc., to less than one-half, or a mean rate of 10 to. 1,000, and of sickness in due proportion in both; ... in prisons and other places under sanitary control, and in the large collection of indigent and dependent children in schools and insti- * Paper read before the British Social Science Association in 1877, on the chief results of the progress of Sanitation.