ly trained and
efficient body of hygienists and medical men, the best of whom have also
qualified as diplomats in trying crises. Any germ-beleaguered city may
call upon this Service for aid. It is a sort of flying squadron of
sanitative defence. When yellow fever broke out in New Orleans, it was
the M. H. S. men who, working quietly and inconspicuously with the local
volunteers, mapped out the campaign which rid the city of the scourge.
In the San Francisco panic eight years ago, when bubonic plague beset
the city, it was the Marine Hospital Service which restored confidence:
and a Service man has been there ever since as the city's chief adviser.
The Federal "surgeons," as they are called, may be in St. Louis helping
to check smallpox, or in Seattle, blocking the spread of a plague
epidemic, or in Mobile, Alabama, fighting to prevent the establishment
of an unnecessary and injurious quarantine against the city by
outsiders, because of a few cases of yellow jack; and all the while the
Service is studying and planning a mighty "Kriegspiel" against the
endemic diseases in their respective strongholds--malaria, typhoid,
tuberculosis, and the other needless destroyers of life which we have
always with us. In the Marine Hospital Service is the germ of a mighty
force for national betterment.

[Illustration: DR. CHARLES HARRINGTON

SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE BOARD OF HEALTH, WHICH, BY THE
DISTRIBUTION OF VACCINE AND ANTITOXIN ALONE, HAS SAVED THE STATE
$210,000]

Of the State boards, perhaps a fourth may be regarded as actively
efficient. The rest are honorary and ornamental. Undoubtedly a majority
would be ready and willing to perform the services for which they are
not (as a rule) paid anything; but they lack any appropriation upon
which to work. South Carolina, for example, has an excellent State
board. Its president, Dr. Robert Wilson, is an able and public-spirited
physician of the highest standing; an earnest student of conditions, and
eager for the sanitary betterment of his State. But when he and his
board undertook to get one thousand dollars from the legislature to
demonstrate the feasibility of enforcing the pure food law and of
turning away the decayed meat for which the State is a dumping-ground,
they were blandly informed that there was no money available for that
purpose. It was in South Carolina, by the way, that a medical
politician who served on the public health committee of the legislature
add