CONTENTS. Proceedings of the Board and Financial Statements. VIII. Reports of County Health Officers. IX. Report of State Veterinarian, X. Health Laws and Rules and regulations and court decisions. GENERAL SUMMARY BY THE SECRETARY. On account of a change in the fiscal year, this report is for an incomplete biennial period, under the old law from April 1, 1910, to January 1, 1911, and under the amended laws and increased appropriation from January 1, 1911, to January 1, 1912. In the future the fiscal year will correspond with the calendar year. In addition to this summary the report will contain the preventive disease circulars which have been widely distributed and so often reproduced by the press that they have been placed and replaced in the hands of every newspaper reading family; the reports from the heads of the several departments created under the amended laws: the medical, health and vital statistics laws and decisions of the courts relating thereto; the rules and regulations prepared and adopted by the Board and recommended for adoption by county and city boards of health, intended for the information and guidance of health officials, physicians, teachers and the people in the various matters to which they relate; reports from county and city boards of health; the proceedings of the Board at regular and called meetings, with reports of its officers and committees and an itemized statement of expenses as filed in the office of the Auditor of Public Accounts, with the duplicate vouchers and open to inspection by all interested persons. The appropriation for the new departments did not become available until January 1, 1911, but the demand for their services became so insistant from every section as soon as it was known that they had been created that out of a small fund which had been saved by rigid economy under the old law, the heads of all of them were selected at a meeting of the board held August 11, 1910, and at reduced salaries. The State Sanitary Engineer and Chemist assumed his duties in September and the Superintendent of Vital Statistics and State Bacteriologist in November of that year. Reference is made to the reports of these several departments for detailed information as to their operations, but their creation had been so long sought and marks such an era in the health and life-saving work in which we are engaged, and must prove such an event in the civil history of Kentucky, as to merit special comment and congratulation. DEPARTMENT OF VITAL STATISTICS. While it is now recognized that a systematic, universal and permanent registration of all births, marriages and deaths lies at the very foundation of all effective health work, occupying the same relation to it that bookkeeping does to all successful commercial and business enterprises, it may be of interest to know that such registration in the older countries was not primarily instituted with this end in view, but to secure proper records of the vital events in each human life for legal uses; and, in the long run it may prove that is one of its most important functions, making it a matter of as much or more importance to court officials, lawyers and political economists than to sanitarians and physicians. Early in the discussion of plans for the conservation of the natural resources of this country and especially of the conservation of health and life, our greatest asset, it came as a shock to political economists, public officials and others, that in Kentucky, where a full official and permanent record is made of every legal procedure, no matter how insignificant and of almost every business or commercial transaction, where immense sums are spent annually for entering and preserving the details of all real estate transfers, in short, where everything involving things having money value, are duly and properly recorded and preserved, in all the history of the State until January 1, 1911, when the new law became operative, human beings had always come into and gone out of the world without any official record or notice being made of the facts. This was the more surprising in a State where there had been long maintained elaborate and expensive systems for recording facts in regard to every pedigreed horse, jack, cow, hog, and statistics in regard to crops, coal, alcoholic spirits and similar matters. On this subject one of our leading writers pertinently says: "There is hardly a relation of life from the cradle to the grave, in which the evidence furnished by an accurate registration of births and deaths may not prove to be of the greatest value, as, for example, in the matter of descent; in the relations of guardians and wards; in the disabilities of minors; in the administration of estates; the settlement of insurance and pensions; the requirement of foreign countries concerning residence, marriage and legacies; in marriage in our own country; in voting and in jury and militia service; in the right to admission and practice in the professions and to many public offices; in the enforcement of laws relating to education and to child labor, as well as to various matters in the criminal code the irresponsibility of children under 10 years of age for crime and misdemeanor; the determination of the age of consent, etc. As the country becomes more densely settled and the struggle for existence sharper, many of |