print of respectable publishing houses, has borne its part, and the detestable 'sociological' conferences, attended by the young and old of both sexes, have done more than the worst plays to break down the barriers of restraint and destroy good manners."

The field of preventive medicine is indeed vast, constantly widening, and most fruitful; in it, through thirty years past,

the DIETETIC AND HYGIENIC GAZETTE has worked, mostly as a gleaner. It is a most congenial field; and we look forward with the utmost gratification to continue working in it; to be as useful as we can in it; and with the hope that when our mantle must, in the course of inexorable nature, be transferred to others' shoulders, we shall not be deemed to have worn it unworthily.

THE General Education Board has, by its gift of $1,500,000 to the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, enabled that institution to work a now long cherished reform in the organization and teaching of the main clinical branches in this institution. The fund is to be named the William H. Welch Endowment for Clinical Education and Research in honor of its professor of pathology; and the trustees of that University are unrestricted in the application of the income. Hopkins will now be able to reorganize its departments of medicine, surgery and pediatrics so that the professors and their chief assistants will receive adequate salaries and will be relieved of the necessity of practicing privately; they will give their whole time to education and research. Should the plan work well it will be extended to the departments of physiology, anatomy, pharmacology and pathology. And here, surely, regarding the latter subjects, were a consummation devoutly to be wished; for the work in them is peculiarly con amore, work to which private practice is not likely to be so adjuvant as in the departments of medicine, surgery and pediatrics.

There have heretofore been very few "full time professors" in medical education. The pediatrics department, of which the head is Dr. John Howland, will be the first to be effected. Next will probably come surgery, under Dr. William S. Halstead; and then medicine, under Dr. Lewellys F.

Barker. It has not yet become fully known whether these physicians will feel themselves able to go on a full term basis. It is thought the salaries will be between ten and fifteen thousand dollars. But that is not now considered the main point. Dr. Welch is reported as saying: "We don't want men who are thinking of salaries only; we want men who will be willing to make sacrifices for research." Of course the services of such men as Dr. John Miller Turpin Finney, Dr. Howard A. Kelly and Dr. Joseph C. Bloodgood will in any event be retained; they will continue with the Medical School as at present. They may be eventually offered positions under this plan; but, if they should not accept, other men in their departments will be made full time assistants, and will devote themselves exclusively to the University. Of course, the full time professors will be unrestricted in seeing private patients, but their work will be done in the hospital; and professional fees for such services will go to the University to further teaching and research. For the present at least there will still be room and need in the Medical School and Hospital for teachers and physicians who are partly engaged in private practice. The teaching of the specialties is not affected by the new plan. The influence of the full time system as applied to the other departments, however, cannot fail to be beneficial upon the whole Medical School and its organization."

Perry's job was a pretty thorough one, all explained in a most interesting volume of 430 pages; and humanitarians, sanitarians and some real statesmen are thinking hard over certain points this doctor has pretty well clinched, as: The death rates of male non-operatives exceeds those of female nonoperatives by 22 per cent.; but the death rates of female operatives exceeds those of male operatives by 33 per cent., despite the former averaging younger. Again: Female operatives have a death rate of more than twice that of non-operatives of their own sex, in some age and race groups many times as high, in the years from 35 to 44 five times as high. And Dr. Perry's conclusion is that operative work is prejudicial to the health of females; that the combination of operative work with matrimony is especially harmful; and that, whilst the general hazard of the female operative is greater than that of the non-operative, the former is in most danger

from tuberculosis. The further conclusion looks as if it were justified, that whilst there has long been a suspicion that a cotton mill is hardly the health resort some mill owners would claim it to be, Dr. Perry's Report demonstrates such working places might more justly be called death resorts. And this Report all the more abundantly justifies satisfaction in the coming reduction of our tariff, an institution fulsomely held through so many dreary years to exist fundamentally for the fostering of the physical and material welfare of the working people; but which, by increasing enormously the cost of the things which the poor must buy, whilst pari passu building up vast individual fortunes, has become in New England, as in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, where protection has so conspicuously demonstrated its blessings, an instrument conducive in reality to human distress and undoing, and to death long before the term natural to humankind.

IN the Life Table for New York City recently issued by its Department of Health, it was shown that, whilst life expectancy for infancy and childhood has greatly increased, that for after forty has diminished, as compared with the calculations issued by Dr. Billings in 1883. This has

moved the "knocker" to observe that we now save our young people from tuberculosis in order that they may die after forty from the degenerative diseases; furthermore, that the humanitarian is mistaken in his now eminently successful efforts to prolong the lives of human weaklings beyond infancy, because the latter's below-par bodies will later become unable to resist the pathological processes that begin to manifest themselves after two score the terminal diseases resulting from the failure of important organs (especially in those thus predisposed) to maintain their efficiency. The answer to this survival of the fittest claim is, obviously enough, that if there is to be no tender solicitude for the afflicted child we must logically go back to

savagery as the ideal human state, and that the wille zum guten, altruism, Christianity itself have been and are colossal errors. But who are the fit, anyway? Only those physically so? Is the spiritual in existence to be ignored? Such were indeed a wofully lopsided philosophy. Many a useful man (the biographical dictionaries teem with the names of them) has been unhealthily born and has had his infant life hanging many days by a thread, until the scale has turned existenceward, with results vastly profitable and beneficial to his kind. The life expectancy of such an one may not have been worth any "practical man" taking a flyer in him. He may never have seen anywhere near forty. But in his brief span he has ineffably and most comfortingly impressed himself upon his day and generation. Hundreds of the world's geniuses and compellers have died before thirty-five of the one disease, tuberculosis. For us certainly it was good that they lived at least the half of three score and ten. Manifestly, length of days is not as important as how they have been lived.

who were employed as laborers were fetched by thousands from Jamaica and other West India Islands, and had theretofore never known grippe nor been exposed to it; in the natural history of infection they were thus extraordinarily subject to its contagion -they had a low relative immunity to it. On the Isthmus they met sufferers from the United States or elsewhere, and thus epidemics quickly took place. Besides, ninety per cent. were then quartered in barracks (now but ten per cent are thus housed); thus grippe spread rapidly. Later the negroes took up quarters outside barracks, had their families come from their native is lands, and thus provided a fresh stock of non-immunes to invite further mischief.

The Canal Zone folk have, however, since become more or less, by acquired immunity, influenza-proof, and suffer now not much. worse than in any American community. Possibly the state of affairs in the Witwatersrand, which Gorgas will visit, is akin to that which formerly existed in Panama. If the labor supply has been maintained by recruiting fresh batches of Kaffirs from various tribes that have not been previously exposed to grippe, the disease would spring rapidly among them, with pneumonia as a sequel in many cases. The remedy would lie in avoiding in the future, as far as possible, such practices. Gorgas will make a general sanitary survey of the mine districts. It is an elevated region, probably not malarious to any degree. Presumably there is more or less typhoid, as anywhere else in the world. Our great sanitarian will certainly get established a regular organiza

tion such as has been accomplished so much in the Canal Zone.

The Kaffirs, it seems, live in compounds quadrangles of buildings, resembling somewhat city blocks and surrounded each by a courtyard, such as in tropical America would be called a "patio." The buildings on the four sides of the courtyards are barracks, used for sleeping and other living purposes; the cooking is done outdoors on the ground, beneath slanting shed-like roofs, that project from the walls of the buildings on their inward sides. Here then, are conditions practically akin to those which formerly obtained in our Canal Zone, and very inviting to grippe and pneumonia epidemics; if at frequent intervals fresh supplies of immunes are introduced from various tribes, a situation is created accounting fully for the pneumonia death rate which has occasioned such consternation in the Witwatersrand.

Influenza is now no more troublesome in Panama than anywhere else, as has been stated; nor has there been yellow fever in that region since 1906; there is some malaria left, but not much. Grippe could be abolished entirely in the Canal Zone, as elsewhere if people could only be convinced that it is worth while to take the necessary trouble; simply by isolating the grippe sufferers, as is done with smallpox cases and as ought to be done with measles cases. With the possible exception of dengue there is no disease in the tropics which attacks so many people as grippe; Gorgas will assuredly reduce the latter's incidence and, if he is properly "backed up," banish it from the Rand, with its so often fatal sequel, pneumonia.

IN our present and several succeeding issues appears and will appear, by official arrangement, the transactions of the recent meetings of the Association for the promotion of Hygiene and Public Baths. It is wholly fitting that the authoritative deliberations of the workers in these important fields, of hygiene and balneology, should be co-ordinated in THE GAZETTE, which has through three decades occupied them. Indeed, Dr. Simon Baruch, the Association's President and a laborer for many years in behalf of hydrotherapy, gave to THE

GAZETTE the first paper on A Public Bath, with plans, published in this country.

We are confident our readers will find the Association's proceedings interesting and most profitable. They will certainly be to all not suffering from an incurable aquaphobia; even that individual may see a light who, in overweening pride, boasted he bathed regularly, every Fourth of July, "whether he needed it or not." May these transactions serve to hasten the day when the public bath will be as essential to American civilization as it was to that of Rome or of Greece.