Preventive medicine in the City of New York : the address in public medicine delivered at the 65th Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, in Montreal, Canada, September, 1897 / by Hermann M. Biggs.

  • Hermann Biggs
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Preventive medicine in the City of New York : the address in public medicine delivered at the 65th Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, in Montreal, Canada, September, 1897 / by Hermann M. Biggs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The conduct of sanitary matters in New York is restrained •by no traditions or precedents. It is determined, from month to month, by what is believed to be for the best good of the ■inhabitants, in view of the most recent knowledge and the latest developments in scientific medicine. The limits of this address do not permit, nor is it desirable, that I should touch upon many of the other phases of the work of the Health Department indirectly related to the prevention •of disease and the preservation of the public health. It has been my purpose, as was stated in the introduction, simply to detail some of the features which have more particu- larly distinguished the work of the New York City Health Department and to describe some of the phases of the sanitary supervision of certain infectious diseases which have been intro- duced by it. I believe it may be truly said that there is no great city in the world to-day which, in the broad sense, is cleaner and healthier than New York. By clean is meant the purity of the atmosphere, the cleanliness of the streets, the abundance and purity of the water supply, and the efficiency of the sewerage system. I wish that so much could be said as to the character -of the habitations of the poor, the public baths and public con- venience stations, the breadth and number of its parks and public commons, and the type of its charitable and penal institutions. In many of these respects New York is deficient; but great and rapid advances have been made and are being made in these matters. When it is said that no city is healthier than New York, this statement is made with a consideration of all the sanitary factors in the situation, such as the size and density of the population, the varied nationality of the inhabitants, the character of climate, etc. Nowhere can there be found a fuller recognition than in the United States of England’s high standard of excellence in public medicine, or a more sincere appreciation of her vast contributions to the progress of sanitary science. But she must look well to her laurels if her cities are to be kept cleaner than the great •cities of the United States and her urban population made
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