Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898.
- Michigan. State Board of Health
- Date:
- 1898
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Proceedings of the quarter-centennial celebration of the establishment of the Michigan State Board of Health : held at Detroit, Michigan, August 9, 1898. 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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![A QUAKTEK-CEM’rJiV OF SANITARY WORK, 1873-1898, TOGETHER WITH A SKETCH OF ITS PRELUDES. BY A. N. BELL, M, D., EDITOR OF THE “SANITARIAN,” BROOKLYN, N. Y. -Mr. (’hairmax, Ladies and Gentlemen:—If your appreciation of sani- tary work (lurin'; the (luarler-century for whicli you have invited me to speak corresponds with my estimate of it, you will, I am contident, shortly ])erceiv(* that llie honor of your invitation has been most un- worthily bestowed. For, while I concur with the j;eneral belief that of all the (|uart(‘r-centuries since the first one of the Christian era, there has been greater pro;;ress in civilization in the ju’esent one than in any other, I venture to think, and shall endeavor to show, that of all the pur- suits of knowled};e that have contributed to human welfare, preventive medicine excels; and the more Ix'cause it has been the chief means by which the art of medicine has been transformed into a science. Hence, while 1 have the coura<>:e to state' this projtosition, I shrink from the I»retension of cajiability to adeepiately express a just aiipreciation of it. Feebly as 1 may, I shall endeavor to show the culmination of this (juarter-century of sanitary work, with which the State Board of Health of Michijtan has beiui closfdy identified, by a brief summary of the pre- ludes and forces which have contribufed to it, and by iiarticulariziiif; some of its achievements. The advent of cholera to En};land in 1831, despite the (quarantine regu- ations which at that time obtained, ^av(* Edwin Chadwick occasion to observe that whatever infectious property there mifiht be in the disease, it was ])articularly jirone to qirevail under filthy conditions. “In Poor Law administration,” he said, “it ajipf^ai-ed to me and my colleafjues, on examination, that the preaf impending visitation would ]»robably advance as to jilaces chiefly on the lines and on local condi- tions on which ordinary ei>idemics jiroceed. I had been prejiared by medical officers to take business out of its turn, because, from the state of the weather, they had a confident expectation that they would have some visitation of one of the ordinary epidemics to deal with. Asking; one of them, the medical officer, what was the spt'cific disease he ap])re- hended, he stated that when he arose in fhe morninp: and found the at- mos])here warm, moist, and sta^rnant, he always found that there would be an increase of some foul air disease—it mij’ht be tyiihoid, it mi<rht be scarlatina, it miht b(> measles, it mifiht be small-pox. but one species or .another of eruptive disease he was sure to have in such weather in the low-lyin;; and ill-drained districts. I asked a relievinji officer of a large district—to test his knowledge of the habitat of such disease—whether, if I gave him some half-dozen calts. he knew where, without previous knowledge, he could go and fill them with fever cases, and he said he could, just as a gamekeeper micht go and iret a bag of sranie—he said he certainly could; the cases might not lie all of typhus, but fever cases of one sort or anothei-; he knew where he could find them. It appeared that small-pox follows on much the same lines as typhus, and so does scarlatina, but with wider deviations as to classes of cases and condi-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22335213_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
