ABSTRACTS FROM ADDRESSES AND PAPERS OF THE NEW JERSEY SANITARY ASSOCIATION.

The second report of this Board (1878) contained an outline of and abstract from the annual meetings of the New Jersey Sanitary Association to that date. Five meetings of the Association have been held since, viz., the fifth, at the State Normal School, Trenton, in December, 1879; the sixth, at Elizabeth, December, 1880; the seventh, at Rutgers College, New Brunswick, December, 1881, and the eighth and the ninth, at the State House, Trenton, December, 1882 and 1883. As there is no printed volume of the transactions of this Association, it is permanent service to our citizens to make brief notices and abstracts of the papers presented or the discussions which arise.

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Dr. J. L. Bodine, the President of the Association in 1879, after giving various reasons why sanitary science and art should receive attention, showed why this study was impossible until physiology, chemistry, geometry and kindred subjects had been pursued, as also why it is that even yet our knowledge is so imperfect :

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"Modern sanitary science, or public hygiene, is a development of present generation, and it is coincident with the advancement of knowledge and improvement in the social condition of the dwellers in civilized communities. The Irish famine, with its large mortality from fever, scurvy and starvation, the various epidemics in recent times of cholera, diphtheria and yellow fever, the great waste of life in the Crimean and our civil war, the systematic study and registry of vital statistics, the investigations into the causation of various diseases and the conditions under which they arise and spread, and many other social influences, have powerfully aided in its development, and have caused it to be the subject of the hour-the subject for discussion and illustration in our daily press and in our popular magazines. Sanitary progress was possible, and some of the greatest triumphs of knowledge in the direction of disease-prevention really did take place in an age before ours. Edward Jenner, in the last century, as a result

of the patient observation and interpretation of a neglected fact, did show how that most contagious, loathsome, fatal and disfiguring disease, small-pox, could be stamped out by the protective influence of an artificial disease communicated by the process of vaccination; and John Howard, that greatest of philanthropists, by intelligent, selfdenying and persistent labor in the accumulation and presentation to the public of the facts of the management of jails and prisons, caused the disappearance of the jail distemper and the black assizes, and so promoted prison reform that it has become the fact, a well-managed modern prison-by its cleanliness, by its equable temperature, by its ventilation, by its abundant water-supply, by its speedy removal of all excreted and refuse material, by the discipline of its occupants, by their regular hours of labor and rest, by their plain, yet sufficient diet, by their protection from changes of the weather, by their deprivation of artificial stimulants, and by their constant medical supervision, so that the beginnings of disease are prevented or treated-has become an exceptionally healthy institution."

Some of the contributions to sanitary science were then noticed:

"Of the contributions to sanitary progress, in modern times, probably no single one has been so fruitful as the discovery of vaccination by Edward Jenner, and none illustrating more clearly Christian charity and self-denying labor for others than the work of John Howard, but modern sanitary science has done much towards improving the knowledge of external conditions and surroundings in their influence upon the health and mental and moral welfare of men. It has traced the causes of diseases and the conditions under which they arise. By the aid of chemistry, and the microscope and other instruments of precision, it has shown the relations of healthy and diseased structure, the adulterations of food and the amount and kind of impurities in air and water, with their results. It has shown the relations between. the ground atmosphere and disease, or, in other words, the results of the impregnation of the ground around and below human habitations. with organic refuse and impurities. It has established the casual relation between a damp soil and consumption, neuralgia, rheumatism and catarrh. It has shown that drinking-water and the supply of milk may become vehicles for the transmission of the material poison of the contagious diseases. It has studied the subject of physical training, in relation to health; the methods of school management and discipline, and the kind, variety and number of school studies in their relation to mental and physical development. It has investigated the relations of heredity, training and environment to the great social evils, crime and insanity. It has shown the effect of occupation upon health and has demonstrated that by overcrowding and defective ventilation the air of workshops and factories may be made such that pulmonary diseases appear to spread from one to another.

"The earthenware manufacturer, or potter, occupies a low place in expectation of life, being below the glass manufacturer, the tool, saw and file-maker, the hatter and the needle-maker, and dying at the same rate as the inn and hotel-keeper. The occupation of the potter is by no means a healthy one. The atmosphere of a pottery is filled with minute particles of quartz and clay, which are by the respiratory act drawn into the lungs, producing, by their presence, irritation, and, in time, structural disease of the lungs. The mould-makers, who work with insoluble plaster of Paris, suffer equally with the working pot-. ters from lung disease, and the kilnmen's work is heavy and of such a character as to subject them to extreme alternations of temperature, and especially liable to rheumatic and catarrhal attacks. The dippers and some others of the operatives suffer from the poisoning of lead. Another source of bad health among the potters is the excessive use of stimulants which prevails among them; but their desire for and use of stimulants may be a result of impaired health as well as a source of continuous impairment of health. I have a decided impression, as a result of considerable experience in attending upon the families of working potters in Trenton, and from such information as careful inquiries have secured from them, that pottery operatives in this country are in better health and longer lived than in England. Our climate is drier; the workshops are new; more work is done by machinery. The lighting and ventilation of the workshops are really attended to, although indefinite improvements in the direction of cleanliness and the supply of pure and dustless air to them are possible.”

The question as to the specific origin of typhoid fever was referred to, as advocated by Dr. William Budd, Prof. Tyndall and Sir Thomas Watson; while Dr. Murchisen, Sir William Jenner, Dr. Bastian and others insist that it may be developed as well as propagated by certain filth conditions.

The chemical analysis of air and water has not yet informed us as accurately and exactly as we could wish as to other sanitary conditions. Important statements were made as to the sanitary defects of Trenton. Among the available paths for future sanitary progress, the address notices the powerful influence of heredity in the development of scrofula, cancer, consumption, rheumatism, gout and various neuroses; the influence of school life on sight and figure, and the social and financial as well as sanitary importance of a closer study of the prevention of insanity. "Our hopes for sanitary progress are the common hopes of humanity for more perfect light and wisdom; we need, for the fulfillment of our hopes, the coöperation of all men who believe that disease is a physical, a social and a moral evil, and therefore

worthy of efforts for its prevention." The subjects under consideration at this meeting were: "The Relations of Soil and Drainage to Death-rate in Jersey City, Hoboken and Paterson;" "The Sanitary Regulation of Schools;" "The True Sphere of Sanitary Laws," and Sanitary Reform in the Smaller Towns."

The report on the drainage and death-rate of Jersey City was ably presented by L. B. Ward, C.E., E. W. Harrison, C.E., Arthur Speilman, C.E., and Charles P. Brush, C.E., with a report on the drainage of Paterson by J. S. Hilton, C.E. These reports embraced careful details as to the needs of drainage and the actual conditions of the most populous parts of Hudson county and the city of Paterson. The interest elicited was such as to attract the attention of the National Board of Health, as well as of the State Board of New Jersey. The facts revealed, as to the condition of parts of Hudson county, seemed to make it proper that in the interests of commerce there should be still further inquiry into a locality that had an extended water front, and was adjacent to the most important harbor of the country. This led the National Board of Health to make a special appropriation of $1,000 for more extended surveys and maps. The work was done under the oversight of the New Jersey State Board of Health, and, after the approval of the Board, the whole amount was paid to the local engineers and officers employed. The results are already on record, in part, in the first report of the National Board, 1879, and in the report of this Board, 1880, pages 48-63, while so much of the report as relates to Jersey City is on file in this office. As these reports are already accessible in print, we need not abstract here, but only refer to the important aid furnished to the work by the preliminary efforts of this association.

In a paper with regard to the sanitary regulation of schools, with special reference to the control of infectious diseases, Dr. H. A. Hopper, of Hackensack, urged the relation which all public and private schools bear to the extension or limitation of disease. We present the following abstracts from this paper:

"The limitation of the spread of contagious and infective diseases, whenever they make their appearance in any community, is, and will always be, a matter of deep concern to the sanitarian, and this concern must extend to a desire for their entire suppression. Most particularly when it involves the safety of a class of our population, whose tender years and helpless dependence appeal strongly to the guardianship of parental affection and through it to a publicly-applied hygienic philanthropy.

"In the midst of our boasted improvements in sanitary plumbing and our knowledge of preventable disease, we find that in many city school buildings exhalations from badly-ventilated and worsewashed water-closets, as well as from entirely unventilated soil-pipes, are constantly permeating the class rooms. Inspection will bring almost daily proof that the ground floors appropriated for recess enjoyment are almost entirely shut in from the open vaulted sky above, and thus from the true source of pure air. This multiplies the avenues of enervation, and constantly defeats the noble design for which such places were instituted-the replenishing of wasted physical force. "The country school house is amenable to as severe criticism for its defective appointments and surroundings. Such establishments can, with very few exceptions, boast of the convenience of their privy vaults in close proximity to the school building, their contents very rarely removed, sending up the gaseous products of organic decomposition, which are wafted by favoring winds through open windows to regale the nostrils of patient-because disciplined-inmates, and scatter the seeds of disease among them. In this connection it is no uncommon discovery to find such privy vaults with uncemeted bottoms, in loose, gravelly soils, percolating their liquid contents through subterranean streams to reach the nearest well or spring from which the potable water-supply is derived to meet the thirsty demands of the

teacher's wards.

"On account of these and other multiplying facts, quite as important, the subject of sanitation in connection with school management addresses itself with peculiar force to the consideration of the thoughtful in every community.

"In order to deal practically, instead of theoretically, with the subject, we propose to present a few tabulated statistics, as a basis for the suggestions which are herein made, for the consideration of this association. The mortality rates of early life, growing out of infectious and contagious factors, it will be found, are so large as to become seriously suggestive to the sanitarian, and should prompt investigation for the discovery of the possible, and probably fruitful, sources of them, and at the same time lead to the most earnest inquiry for the best means to be employed for their abatement.

"By consulting the Bulletin of Public Health, we find that the following average monthly data since April, 1879, present a table of no small proportions in illustration of the whole subject.

"Tabulated reports from twenty-three towns and cities, representing nearly every section of our country, and including a population of 6,000,000 souls, exhibit more or less perfectly the monthly death-rate: