Excerpt from First Annual Report of the Department of Public Health: July 1, 1917 to June 30, 1918

The State Department of Public Health, created by the Civil Administrative Code, came into being at a time when the Nation and State were beginning to adapt themselves to the new and complex problems of a Nation at war. These problems were encountered very early in the history of the department and were so urgent in character that they had to be met, often at the sacrifice of certain definite features of the program which had been mapped out for execution in times of peace. Practically every division of the department has felt and responded to this wartime demand.

The Executive Division has participated in the creation of the medical machinery for the enlistment of the National Army, the Director has responded to calls for service in a large number of conferences of National scope looking toward the sanitary and health control about military cantonments, the conservation and development of State health organizations and similar wartime problems.

The Division of Sanitation, the Division of Communicable Diseases and the Division of Surveys and Rural Hygiene have been called upon to conduct broad surveys and to engage in extensive health work in the sanitary zones created about the several camps and cantonments within the State.

The Division of Tuberculosis has been subjected to unusual wartime pressure and the Assistant Director has been charged with the supervision of the medical care of soldiers returned to the State on account of tuberculosis, whose number has exceeded 1, 500 at the time these pages are written.

In addition to the wartime activities imposed upon the divisions originally created, it has been found necessary to create an entirely new Division - that of Social Hygiene - for the purpose of meeting the venereal disease problem about the military camps and in the civil population and to cooperate with the Federal Government in this important activity.

And so the following pages will constitute a doubly interesting public document, primarily, because it contains the annals of the activities of the first year of the first simon-pure health department the State of Illinois has ever had, and second, because it describes the public health activities of a great State adapting itself to wartime conditions.

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