President's Address.

Maryland Public Health Association, May 11, 1899.

DR. EDWARD M. SCHAEFFER, BALTIMORE.

The record of the past year is one of which our membership may well be proud, and for which the general public, deeply grateful. I take for granted that every one of us is interested in the work which the State Board of Health, through its most efficient Secretary, is inaugurating and accomplishing. Scattered as is our membership throughout every county of this beautiful State of Maryland, each has a duty of co-operation to discharge, assisting local health officers, awakening intelligent public sentiment along sanitary lines, and setting an example of enlightened, conscientious, good citizenship.

Glancing over this Report, you will observe that one county in the State is still unprovided with a board of health or even local officer.

Twelve important towns are enumerated which have no local boards of Health, although most of them have a health officer on whose shoulders rests the responsibility and odium of abating public nuisances, lowering the mortality and sickness rate, and thereby incidentally improving real estate values, attracting new enterprise and capital to a permanent residence; not to speak of the summer boarder, who is no mean desideratum in rural communities. Here you may read of perils by water and perils by milk, due as is justly stated to criminal ignorance and indif ference; and it is your own fault if you are not guided accordingly in planning your summer vacations. Typhoid fever, a filth disease and a sanitary disgrace, averages about a thousand innocent victims a year, and yet is one of the most easily prevented diseases.

I take pleasure in quoting, on the other side of the picture, the reference in the Report to one town of less than three thousand inhabitants, which "has its own registration of vital statistics, issues burial permits, enforces the (contagious disease) notification ordinances, practices isolation and disinfection at public cost, makes systematic inspections, uses the newspapers to propagate a knowledge of hygiene, and makes detailed and truthful reports to the State Board of Health." Health, wealth and happiness attend the future of Brunswick, Frederick County!

While extending congratulations and felicitating ourselves and the general public on the movement for the betterment of

the physical, social and moral conditions of the body politic, so conspicuously coming to the front all along the line, permit me to emphasize, without being invidious, the various villageimprovement societies that have been organized, the healthprotective branches of the United Women of Maryland, and here in Baltimore the record of our new Health Commissioner, the school investigations of the Arundell Club, and the work of the Children's Summer Playground Association.

SMALLPOX-A BLESSING.

Maryland has recently been blessed, from a sanitary standpoint at least, by a threatened invasion of smallpox from her neighboring States.

This danger has happily been averted to the great credit of our health authorities, State and municipal. Honorable mention is certainly due this loathsome disease and its predecessor, the cholera, for valuable services rendered the educative aims and purposes of our Association-so long as neither has applied for active membership therein.

Even the children are picking up sanitary crumbs that fall from their father's table, as this incident illustrates:

Asking a bright, little country lad, this spring, when he expected to accompany his elder brothers to school, I was gratified to hear this up-to-date answer: "As soon as I am seven years old-and have been vaccinated." If he had only inserted the qualification, "successfully," he would have been a young Daniel come to judgment.

Dr. Ruhrah, the Quarantine Physician of Baltimore, gives an interesting resume of our local smallpox statistics in the April issue of the Journal of the Alumni Association of the College of Physicians and Surgeons:

"Since the fall of 1881, there have been 1,106 cases of smallpox cared for in the Quarantine Hospital, of which there are fairly complete records as to mortality and vaccination. Of the 645 unvaccinated cases, 48.8 per cent., or almost every other case, died; of the 441 cases which had been vaccinated, 378 recovered, leaving a mortality rate of only 14.3 per cent. This is high, but taking into account the otherwise unusually high mortality, it conferred a great protection. In the 20 cases where the vaccination had been unsuccessful, 14 recovered and 6 died. Almost all of the cases were in adults. Cases in vaccinated children under ten years of age were exceptional. This is a notable fact when one considers that in the prevaccination days smallpox was a disease of childhood as much as scarlet fever or measles of to-day."

THE SELF-EXTERMINATING ANIMAL.

Man, however, continues to be the self-exterminating animal, and very tenaciously guards his questionable distinction. I can

not imagine a more hopeless task for the last survivor than to be called on to explain to an intelligent and aged bee in what the pleasures and profits of human suicidal and fratricidal intoxication consisted.

EDUCATION THE REMEDY.

The word, Education, practically covers the whole territory. Education out of selfishness and narrow-mindedness; education in the schools and colleges for the practical duties of citizenship and conscientious parentage; education away from trivialities on the one hand, and a digest of the universe on the other, to the essentials of every-day living in righteous brotherhood. Our children must be educated "to live and let live," and when they grow up and act accordingly, as has already been said here, one of the most important factors of social discontent will have been removed.

In the words of a clear thinker: "Let us have in education, literature and analytical studies, and science with its grand constructions and sanifying discipline-all the useful elementsbut let the true goal of education be kept ever in view, which is, not to enable this individual or that to shoot to a pre-eminence over his fellows, but to place the individual in right relations with his fellows; to give to each a career of useful activity, and to prevent that dreary disappointment with life and all its works which overtakes so many in their declining years."

HEALTH MUST BE EARNED.

"The art of living rightly," said the poet Goethe, "is like all arts: it must be learned and practiced with incessant care." Health must be earned-it cannot be purchased directly. As an afterthought in life, its attainment is uncertain, and full of remorse and bitter disappointment. Ignorance excuses no man, community or nation, and Nature's reckoning is, like all her laws, inexorable.

Who planned the curricula in our schools and colleges, and acquired the right to delude many graduates into believing that they were really educated, in any but a literary sense, for the stern, practical, altruistic relationships of life? I presume it was the schoolmen, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," and leading lives of seclusion, rather than men in touch with the great problems of every-day existence.

Says the scholarly Dr. Andrew Wilson, of England, after quoting the pleas of Combe and Spencer, for a rational respect for the claims of the body in education: "My one grumble in life is that while we are advancing at last in the matter of technical education in so far as trades are concerned, we linger and lag in the matter of health-teaching, that most vital of all

subjects. What are the opportunities for the average man or woman to acquire a training in the laws and practice of health? Is the subject taught in schools? Is it made a compulsory and essential part of ordinary education-this vital knowledge which teaches us how to live long and to live happily? ... It is better to be healthy than learned when all

is said and done."

If any parents who make no protest against this mediæval system of polite learning reckon their offspring among those "unfitted to survive," they will soon find in this age when law, both human and Divine, counts every man "his brother's keeper," in a sanitary sense, that neighbors may decline to take a fatalistic view of their likewise early decease, and proceed to take out a writ of benevolent assimilation as a corrective.

It is high time to awake out of sleep. This promises to be a banner year for all public school interests in Maryland, and especially in Baltimore under the Magna Charta.

Let each earnest friend of true education now resolve to get out a new edition of himself, if need be, and lay in a liberals stock of "mental disinfectants" for use wherever most indicated in his community. I have borrowed this phrase from an amusing and vigorous poem. It is not by Kipling, but quite apropos of our friend, the common enemy:

"Yes, when spring-cleaning comes around
Bring forth the duster and the broom,

But rake your fogy notions down,

And sweep your dusty soul of gloom.

Sweep old ideas out with the dust,

And dress your soul in newer style;
Scrape from your mind its worn-out crust,
And dump it in the rubbish pile.

Clean out your moral cubby-holes,

Sweep out the dirt, scrape off the scum; 'Tis cleaning time for healthy souls

Get up and dust. The spring has come!

Clean out the corners of the brain,

Bear down with scrubbing brush and soap,
And dump old Fear into the drain,

And dust a cosy chair for Hope.

Scrub up the windows of the mind,
Clean up and let the spring begin;
Swing open wide the dusty blind,

And let the glorious sunshine in.
Yes, clean your house, and clean your shed,
And clean your barn in every part,

But brush the cobwebs from your head,

And sweep the snowbanks from your heart!"

-S. W. Foss.

FALSE GODS.

The true reformer's lot is not a happy one-he is between two dangers: his own enligtened sincerity and earnestness, the impelling force, and the ignorance, apathy and prejudices of the public at large, a rather disheartening and repelling obstacle. With charity to all and malice to none, let him, however, speak the truth, modestly, tactfully, fearlessly, as he knows, feels, and lives it.

Fetish-worship, the belief in amulets, charms, Christian Science, falsely so-called (for, as Rev. Dr. Parkhurst says, "it is neither Christian nor scientific,") patent medicines, horsechestnuts, rabbits' feet, camphor bags, amber necklaces, etc., all these represent phases of human credulity and self-deception, not to speak of intentional fraud and avarice, which keep people from the temples of the true goddess of health, Hygeia. The gods help those who help themselves-by the intelligent and discriminating use of the every-day, duly appointed means of grace and salvation. Persons who throw themselves down from the pinnacle of seductive sophistry and speculation to test their faith and heal "the mental conceptions of disease in their nonexistent bodies," will be very likely to crush what anatomists call bones and vital organs, in such an effective way as to earn premature burial from a prosaic, matter-of-fact world.

And what shall we say of patent medicines and nostrums? The habit of mind which takes on this form of periodical insanity is well nigh universal.

"Hungry is the Anglo-Saxon throat for medicine," as Dr. Wood recently remarked before a medical convention in this city. "Nostrums represent a lottery where few get prizes. The embalmment of a lie in printer's ink makes it as indestructible as a dried mummy. The public knows it all, while the doctor learns by hard study that he knows but little. When the sheep wish to be devoured, the wolf can hardly be blamed." Dr. Wood sums up the conclusion of the matter as follows: "So long as there be trout to rise, so long will there be fishermen to make their deadly casts. The credulous, the ignorant, the men and women who want to be deceived, the despairing who grasp at every floating straw, will exist until the coming of the millenium demonstrates that through the succession of the ages the suffering of innumerable human units has perfected human nature; but let us see to it that we in no way aid those who, serving the father of all liars, wax rich and wanton on the miseries of their fellows."

One influence we can exert in favor of clean, respectable and honest journalism. It is nothing less than an insult for any paper that aspires to be read in the family circle to flaunt the portraits of quacks and their simple-minded dupes, along with