This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1877. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY THE SECRETARY OF THE ASSOCIATION. The third volume of papers and transactions of the Public Health Association comprises such completed contributions as the Publication Committee found at the beginning of the year 1877, in a suitable state to be issued together. Numerous papers of interest and value, but more or less incomplete or merely suggestive, have been given to the public journals in such manner as to best serve the purpose for which their authors contributed them to this Association at its annual meetings; and these, with other incomplete, though greatly appreciated offerings, are omitted from this volume. The Minutes of the Fourth Annual Meeting are presented in an abstract form. But the notes of the discussions upon the various topics are necessarily excluded. These, like the papers Jhat are omitted, were amply reportad by the daily press at the time of the meeting. During the past year, the public attention to practical applications of sanitary knowledge has kept pace with the rapid growth of it and the methods of public health service. While physicians and naturalists are steadily pushing their researches to useful conclusions in regard to the phenomena and causation of destructive maladies, and are discovering their controllable factors of propagation, the State and local boards of health, the sanitary inspector and the engineer, the public economist and the philanthropist have appealed to the resources of hygiene, and turned them to use, with constantly increasing success, for the protection of human life and health. The domestic pests, --of which scarlatina and diphtheria are most dreaded, --the insidious infection and diffusion of the enteric typhoid poison, the self-propagating scourge of yellow fever which decimated Savannah,