Excerpt from Transactions of the Section on Preventive Medicine and Public HealthThe colonial period brought forth an attempt on the part of the various ports and cities to exclude and eradicate pestilential disease. This was a local, nu organized, and non-uniform movement, too often in¿uenced by commercial motives and civic pride, but the seed of preventive medicine thus sown took root, and one of the first bills introduced into the First Congress of the United States provided for the assump tion of the quarantine power by the federal govern ment. But the time was not ripe, and we passed through a long period of state and local quarantine, and not a few devastating epidemics, before the citizen ship had evolved to the point where it would impose these duties on the general government. Even then we were unprepared for the step, and the short-lived national Board of Health came and went, but not before it had touched with prophetic finger the heart of the problem of the public health, the state and local boards of health. In a republic where the right to govern rests on the consent of the governed, where public senti ment very largely in¿uences the enforcement of sanitary law, where people think before they obey, the comer stone of the whole public health fabric is the state board of health, and its efficiency determines in large measure the efficiency of the whole.Coincident with the development of the state boards came the improvement of the federal health agencies. The national Board of Health was a de new creation springing fully formed from the brains of a number of the most brilliant and public-spirited medical men of their time. The principle on which it was founded.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.