REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE BOARD.

To His Excellency George C. Ludlow,

GOVERNOR-The State Board of Health of New Jersey begs leave to present to your Excellency its seventh report. The duty assigned to us in the constituting act was "to take cognizance of the interests of health and life among the citizens of this State; to make sanitary investigations and inquiries in respect to the people; the causes of disease, and especially of epidemics; the sources of mortality, and the effects of localities, employments, conditions and circumstances on the public health, and to gather such information in respect to these matters as it might deem proper for diffusion among the people.' Since that time various other laws have been placed upon the statutes of the State, which have assigned to us other important duties. In the fulfilment of these obligations we find ourselves charged with responsibilities that relate to high social and industrial interests of the citizens, and that most directly concern the welfare of our whole population.

While there is a general consent to the fact that health is a great blessing, and that the preservation of life is, as a rule, the essential duty of a good government, there is not an adequate appreciation of the value of wellness as a source of strength and prosperity to a State. Industry, capital and security depend upon it as a resource. To foster it is to foster the dearest interests of a people. As science, observation and statistics are constantly showing how many deaths are avoidable and how many diseases are preventible, there is no direction in which intelligent judgment and reasonable expenditure yields better results. It cannot be concealed that premature death and burdens of sickness are constantly resulting from insanitary conditions which never should have occurred. The common consent that nuisances injurious to health must be abated, is an argument that such as could have been avoided should never had occurred. The liberal outlay made to stop an

epidemic after it has attained headway, suggests that a truer economy would have been to avoid its causes or deal with it in the first household. With regard to our own country and our own State, it is not unsafe to re-affirm that the same is true as was some time since asserted by Mr. Simon in reference to England:

"It is the common conviction of those who have most studied the subject, that the deaths which occur are by fully a third part more numerous than they would be if existing knowledge of the chief causes of disease were reasonably well applied throughout the country. This annual excess has the terrible further meaning that, as a rule, each death represents a number of other cases in which preventible disease, not fatal, has had far-reaching ill effects on the continued life, or added the many embarrassments which occur from more fatal attacks of sickness.

"Death accounts also, whose figures, arithmetically, make but little show, may, for administrative purposes, have immense meaning. One or two deaths in some village may, in hundreds of instances, correspond to long-continued local conditions of scandalous filth and unwholesomeness; one or two deaths by scarlatina or small-pox, almost unnoted in regard of some considerable town, may represent the beginning of what, three months later, will be a terrible epidemic, agitating the community with distress and fear, and adding prodigiously to the whole year's death rate of the place. In proportion as a disease is present the time of preventing it is past; but, for practical purposes, it is indeed all-important to remember that sanitary administration has its hope of success in preventing, not in arresting, great epidemics; and that if warnings are not taken from the smaller excesses of disease, catastrophes, not further warnings, may be next to come. It seems almost unnecessary to add, that a method of procedure which waits for death as its ground of action, may peculiarly dispense with cumulative proofs; and that, as no one preventible death can be remedied in regard of him who has suffered it, so the record of it may the more emphatically claim to be read as a protest on behalf of others."

No one can make even a cursory or superficial study of the contrasts between the death rates and sickness rates of city and country, or parts even of the same city, without learning that these are often but the forcible declaration that either the persons or the places are not. conforming to the known laws of healthful existence. Sanitary art, made up as it is of medical and mechanical knowledge, and having ascertained how it is possible to make ground and houses best adapted for human dwelling-places, and how men, women and children should live so as to be true to the demands of sound humanity, no longer