Public Health Papers and Reports (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. REPORT ON A SANITARY SURVEY OF THE UNITED STATES. (Continued.) [submitted At The Annual Meeting, Chicago, September 25, 1877.] By DR. E. HARRIS, Chairman. The schedules which Dr. J. S. Billings submitted to the Association in 1874, and which were reported complete at the annual meeting in Baltimore in 1875, have awaited the development of resources, in the States or under the National Government, which shall be found adapted and adequate to the project, not only of such surveys, but to the practical analysis of their accumulated data. It must not be supposed that the delays which precede action are to be counted as lost time. The great systematic inquiry and survey vill undoubtedly be inaugurated as soon as the nation has a recognized system and central bureau or department for the public care of health. The best organized of the State Boards of Health, if well supported, could soon begin, and, in a year or two, complete the survey and inquiry as devised in the committee's schedules. This work requires both the pecuniary means and the central organization, with a systematic support of such an organization in a State. The National Public Health Service, if ever organized, will almost necessarily depend upon State and Municipal Boards of Health for the mature results of such a general sanitary survey. Not that the nation might not order and provide for the survey, but that the practical purposes of it can be attained only by certain kinds of general interest and actual cooperation in the several States. The proposed survey is a specific kind of preliminary inquiry along the numerous lines of physical facts upon which public health chiefly depends. A portion of the data may be reduced to definite forms as readily as the topographer reduces his field-notes of a sur...