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Barometric, thermometric, and hygrometric states of the atmosphere for every day in the year, indicating, in columns, the amount in inches, of rain, hail, and snow.

1. MORTALITY:

II.-MORTUARY TABLES.'

From fevers; from measles, smallpox, and varioloid.

From diseases of the lungs and air-passages.

From diseases of the nervous system.

From diseases of the organs of nutrition.

From diseases of the urino-genital organs.

2. CAUSES assigned for death where the number exceeds 10 per cent. of the whole.

3. QUARTERLY TABLES, showing the whole number of deaths of white and of colored persons under 1 year, from 1 to 2, from 2 to 5, from 5 to 10, from 10 to 15, from 15 to 20, and for every decennial period over 20.

III.-PREVALENT DISEASES.

1. EPIDEMICS AND ENDEMICS OF THE YEAR:

Their origin and march; apparently contagious or not; how affected by race, age, sex, temperament, avocation, circumfusa, ingesta, and the density of population.

2. FEVERS:

Intermittent and remittent; their frequency as compared with that of former years.

Typhus and typhoid fevers; smallpox; benefits of vaccination; measles; scarlatina.

3. OTHER DISEASES:

Observations on their etiology, pathology, and therapeutics.
Peculiarity of type or tendency.

Number of cases, and a comparison of it with that of other
years.

4. MISCELLANEOUS :

Medical effects of indigenous plants, and of new remedies.
Facts of interest in surgery and obstetrics.

Notices of members deceased during the year.

List of officers and members..

If, as is to be feared in many counties, the materials for this classification cannot be obtained, the reporter is requested to approximate as closely to it as his means of information will admit.

2 In describing cases, give the age, sex, condition, and location of patient, season of year, treatment, and termination.

REPORT OF THE ADAMS COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETY.

THE Medical Society of Adams County held its regular meetings during the year, and received the cordial support of the profession. Adams County has been free of diseases of a malarial characterbeing thickly settled and well drained.

During the fall and winter seasons, the towns and villages were subjected to exciting causes producing zymotic diseases; diphtheria, in its different forms, was developed.

The cases were generally mild, yielding readily to the influence of chlorate of potassa and carbolic acid in solution, applied locally, and tonics given internally.

Verbal reports of special cases were made by Doctors Dill, Holtz, Pierson, McClure, and Baehr.

Monographs were presented by Dr. Robert Horner on the advantages of conservative surgery.

Dr. R. S. Seip on midwifery, in which was detailed the particulars of the delivery of a monster child weighing 20 pounds.

Dr. McClure, a paper upon consumption.

Dr. J. W. C. O'Neal, contribution to the History of the Katalysine Spring at Gettysburg, and a comparison of its powers with waters of foreign springs.

A second paper upon puerperal fever and its treatment.'

All of which is respectfully submitted.

WALTER H. O'NEAL.

Secretary.

1 None of these papers were received by the Committee of Publication.

REPORT OF THE ALLEGHENY COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETY.

As our Society comprises a majority of the regular practitioners of the county, and has been in existence long enough to test its usefulness, a few words descriptive of its plan and workings may not be out of place in our report to the State Medical Society.

We desire only to call attention to one or two features in its organization which seem to us to be of great practical value, and which, so far as we are aware, have not been adopted by similar associations. In the first place our meetings are held monthly, and at all, except those held in January, April, July, and October, medical matters alone are discussed. In these meetings the roll is called alphabetically and any gentlemen present is at liberty to respond or not. If prepared, he is expected to present a case or cases clinically observed, and illustrated by drawings and pathological specimens, if necessary. The case is then open for general discussion. At the conclusion of the roll call, any member who may desire to read a paper on medical or collateral science is next in order. Thus we encourage the younger members of the Society to engage in practical investigation, while we afford ample opportunity to the more advanced student to indulge his theoretical notions. In the next place we would call attention to an article in our constitution which prohibits any member of the Society admitting into his office a student of medicine until he presents a certificate from the examining committee, testifying that he has been duly examined, and has a good English education and sufficient knowledge of Greek and Latin to enable him to pursue his studies with advantage.

Believing the standard of professional education can only be gradually elevated, and that the course adopted by our Society for the regulation of medical students strikes at the root of the evil, we would respectfully recommend that the State Society take such action as will make it obligatory on all county societies to adopt the foregoing article in their organic law.

Within the past year we have lost three of our members by death: Drs. A. G. McCandless, Jas. P. Alcorn, and Thomas H. Elliott. Their biographical notices are appended to this report.

As will be shown by the Report of the Board of Health of Pittsburg, the past year has been unusually healthy. The only epidemic worthy of special consideration occurred at the House of Refuge or Reform School of Western Pennsylvania, in the winter of 1874 and 1875, in which ninety per cent. of the inmates suffered with typhoid fever and dysentery. The Allegheny County Medical Society, in January last, appointed a committee to inquire into the origin and cause of the endemic above referred to. And while we cannot within the limits of this report include all the varied and laborious methods employed by the gentlemen who conducted the investigation, we offer no apology for presenting the following abstract of their labors. Their report would seem to prove most conclusively that the inmates of the Reform School were surrounded by conditions most pernicious to health; and that especially to the poisonous condition of the drinking water must be attributed diseases that made it more a pest house than an asylum for reformation.

Abstract of Report on Endemic at Reform School of

Western Pennsylvania.

The main sewer is three feet in diameter, is constructed of brick and cemented; it drains the wards, main building, wash house, laundry, kitchens, yards, water-closets, bath-rooms, the officers' quarters, and empties into the river (at high-water mark) in front of and at a distance from the main building of 150 feet; the sewer from the boys' privy empties into the river 180 feet below the main sewer, and that of the girls 180 feet above, both at high-water mark.

The main water supply pipe is six feet above, parallel with girls' sewer, and extends into the river 250 feet beyond the mouth of the sewer. At the terminus of the water supply pipe, the water is said to be about three feet deep, at low water, and of swift current; the supply of water from the river is pumped into a tank on the fourth story of the building, which contains 13,000 gallons, and is filled twice daily.

The bed of the river, at the point where the girls' sewer empties, is smooth and declines at a moderate grade to the mouth of the water-supply pipe; according to the statement of the engineer, at low-water, a person can walk out on the cover of the water-supply pipe 200 feet, or, within fifty feet of its terminus, and the end of the pipe makes an angular or curved projection down the stream, ten or twelve feet; the fall of the girls' sewer is stated to be one foot in five.

The wells, one in each yard, and designated respectively boys and girls, are sixty feet deep, and on the platform, about fifteen feet above high-water mark; they are situated about thirty feet from the main sewer.

Specimens of water from all sources of supply were taken for examination, viz: from boys' and girls' wells, and from the tank supplied with river water; the tank had just been filled, and the river was at high stage; the specimen was drawn from a pipe which entered the tank one inch above the bottom. After subjecting the water to the ordinary tests for organic matter and other deleterious agents, it was found to contain impurities that would render it unwholesome, but not in sufficient quantity to cause any acute disturbance of the system. The water of both wells was clear and beautiful in appearance, and contained salts of lime in much greater quantity than the tank water. On adding Nessler's test, the characteristic indication of ammonia was exhibited in all the specimens, but rather more decidedly in the water from the wells than the tank, while water in three different parts of the city (Pittsburg) gave no indication of such contamination.

It was suggested by Dr. Riggs that the committee had better inquire whether or not the facts would prove this endemic to be really typhoid fever; he also stated he had knowledge of twentyfive cases of malarial fever occurring during this endemic, which he and others called typhoid fever. In reply, Dr. Daly positively affirmed that he called none of his 210 cases typhoid fever that did not show the pure typhoid pathognomonic symptoms, viz: the high temperature, enteric symptoms, such as diarrhoea, illiac tenderness, hemorrhage from the bowels, epistaxis, and even uterine hemorrhage, and the characteristic eruption, dry brown tongue, sordes, and delirium.

To these 210 cases of fever must be added sixty cases of typhoid dysentery, and as the entire number in the house during the endemic was about three hundred, ninety per cent. of the inmates suffered from the infection.

As Dr. Daly's onerous duties prevented him from recording in detail the history, symptoms, and progress of his cases, which might have been tabulated, and conclusions drawn therefrom by your committee, there was left for it to accept the only alternative that the diagnosis was correct, and to seek for the origin of an endemic typhoid fever.

It now being a remote time since the occurrence of the endemic, your committee deem it impossible to be positive as to its actual

cause.

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