The Public Health.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 133, 4 December 1895, Page 2

The Public Health.

If New York is celebrated for the' corruption existing in civic circles it certainly deserves mention for the excel- . lence of the city arrangements for checking the spread of disease. The New York Board of Health has really extirpated locally the small- pox and typhas fever and some other minor plagues, and has saved it three times from cholera, but it is ever on the watch for new opportunities of usefulness. The rooms of consumptives are now thoroughly disinfected as soon as the patients are dead, and a very determined effort is being made to prove that cancer is contagious—founded mainly upon a single but apparently very instructive case— and that, therefore, cancer patients should be segregated. Meanwhile, new and stringent regulations for the public schools have been promulgated. Slates and pencils and sponges are perforce to give place to pencils and paper, which are evidently far less dangerous media of disease ; books taken from schools must be re-covered with brown Manila paper at least once each month, so that microbes more than 30 days old shall become an impossibility ; and the common fountains with one or two cups shall be discontinued, and in their place shall be furnished pitchers of frequently renewed water, with a numbered cup for each pupil, an interchange of caps under any circumstances being strictly forbidden. It is hard, of course for a man to be hauled away from his friends to die on a lonely island of typhus fever or small-pox, but it would be harder to let him stay at home and infect first his family and then the entire city. The improved life rate in the city is said to be sufficient justification for the irksomeness of having to obey strict sanitary regulations.