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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![The germ-theory of disease was yet struggling for recognition, and there were, probably, in July, 1873, when the Michigan tState Board of Health Act took effect, more believers in the theory of spontaneous generation than in the doctrine of a living contagion as the cause of disease. The culture-tube, the bacteriologic microscope, the instruments of Ijrecision familiar to the present day, were then known only to a few isolated students. Disinfection, now an exact science—its practice subject to the con- trol tests of the laboratory—was then a rule-o’-thumb art, whose best results were obtained by disengaging a smell so foul and irrespirable that it compelled doors and windows to be opened for the access of nature’s potent disinfectant—fresh air. The modes of the spread of the contagia of the communicable diseases were only vaguely guessed at—indeed, some of the most prevalent and deadly’ of the'preventable diseases, tuberculosis, for example, were not even recognized as communicable, still less were their causes known or their waj’s and means of propagation understood; while induced im- munity against the infective diseases of the human family was limited to the empiric practice of vaccination. And so in almost every branch of what may now justly claim to be an exact science there was incertitude, vagueness, speculation and pri- meval ignorance. It was in this field that the Michigan State Board of Health entered twenty-five years ago and a record of its labors and achievements during the intervening period would be a history of the development of sanitary science to its present well-nigh perfect j)roportions. I will not here attempt even to summarize these labors and achieve- ments. Their story is well and fully set forth in the pages of Mr. Mac- Clure’s volume, “A Quarter of a Century of Public-Health Work in Michigan”, to which you all have access. What God hath wrought through this Board is therein tersely told in the statement that between 1890 and 1890, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand cases of sickness were prevented and more than seven thousand lives were saved from premature death through the advice, instructions and supervision of the Board. It is not too much to say that the State Board of Health of Michigan has. in the language of our great classic in hygiene, Edmund Parkes, made growth more perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, death more remote for every citizen within the boundaries of this fair State. And now, what of the future of the Board? At first blush it may seem that the field of usefulness of a State Board of Health is a narrow one. On reflection, however, we will discover that its function is as broad as civilization itself. It follows the citizen in all his dealings through all his days. It begins at his birth and even before; it has him under observation whatever his occupation or wherever his mission through all his life to its close, and it keeps careful vigil at his grave until the last vestige of his remains is crumbled into the dust from whence it came. There is no situation in life that escapes its scrutiny. Every incident that lowers the vitality, that depraves the mind or that whets an abnormal appelite calls for its interference. It holds no des])ot’s sway to club mankind along paths that are hard. It](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22335213_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
