Letter of the president of the Board.

  • New Haven (Conn.). Department of Health.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter of the president of the Board. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    LETTER OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD. Office of the Board of Health, } New Haven, March si, 1881. ) To the Honorable Court of Common Council of the City of New Haven : Gentlemen: I herewith submit to your Honorable Body the Eighth Annual Reports of the Health Officer and of the Clerk of the Board of Health, for the year ending December 31, 1880. With the presentation of previous Annual Reports, I have called the attention of your Honorable Body to the difference in the death-rate in the different wards of our city, to the functions of Health Boards in general, and to their relations to our wealth and prosperity. New Haven has still the proud distinction of having the lowest death-rate of any seaport of its size in the world (so far as I can learn), but that it is practicable to considerably reduce this already low rate, I as firmly be- lieve as I do in any other fact demonstrated by science. The work of reduction has already begun and is now going on as a part of the progress of our city, and the only reason why it does not go on faster is, that in this busy age everybody cannot keep up with the rapid pro- gress made in modern scientific knowledge, of which Sanitary science is but one phase. To further this end, so beneficent to humanity and so important to the pros- perity of our city, it seems to me well to again call your attention to some of the elementary truths of Sanitary science, to give its position and status as compared with other sciences, to explain its methods, give the basis of its deductions, notice its possibilities, and then to make some simple application to our own case. The immediate object of Physical Science is to discover the laws of Nature, and when these have been discussed and published, the knowledge becomes a part of the