conditions often shameful beyond expression.  The solution of the problem is not very difficult.  What has been done elsewhere can be done here.  It is not so much in the cities, though here too the death rate is still high, but in the smaller towns and rural districts, in many of which the sanitary conditions are still those of the Middle Ages.  How Galen would have turned up his nose with contempt at the water supply of the capital of the Dominion of Canada, scourged so disgracefully by typhoid fever of late!  There is no question that the public is awakening, but many State Boards of Health need more efficient organization, and larger appropriations.  Others are models, and it is not for lack of example that many lag behind.  The health officers should have special training in sanitary science and special courses leading to diplomas in public health should be given in the medical schools.  Were the health of the people made a question of public and not of party policy, only a skilled expert could possibly be appointed as a public health officer, not, as is now so often the case, the man with the political pull.

     (7a) Connecticut.

It is a long and tragic story in the annals of this country.  That distinguished man, the first professor of physic in this University in the early years of last century, Dr. Nathan Smith, in that notable monograph on “Typhus Fever” (1824), tells how the disease had followed him in his various migrations, from 1787, when he began to practice, all through his career, and could he return this year, in some hundred and forty or one hundred and fifty families of the state he would find the same miserable tragedy which he had witnessed so often in the same heedless sacrifice of the young on the altar of ignorance and incapacity.

TUBERCULOSIS

In a population of about one million, seventeen hundred persons died of tuberculosis in this state in the year 1911—­a reduction in thirty years of nearly 50 per cent.  A generation has changed completely our outlook on one of the most terrible scourges of the race.  It is simply appalling to think of the ravages of this disease in civilized communities.  Before the discovery by Robert Koch of the bacillus, we were helpless and hopeless; in an Oriental fatalism we accepted with folded hands a state of affairs which use and wont had made bearable.  Today, look at the contrast!  We are both helpful and hopeful.  Knowing the cause of the disease, knowing how it is distributed, better able to recognize the early symptoms, better able to cure a very considerable portion of all early cases, we have gradually organized an enthusiastic campaign which is certain to lead to victory.  The figures I have quoted indicate how progressively the mortality is falling.  Only, do not let us be disappointed if this comparatively rapid fall is not steadily maintained in the country at large.  It is a long fight against a strong