View report page

8
only because the grosser forms of domestic uncleanliness
have now been immensely abated; but especially
because your Inspectors have grown so
familiar with the duties in question, and your
copying-clerk so practised in keeping account of
all sanitary business, that this department of your
work now moves almost with the regularity of a
machine.*
And other influences, tending year by year to
lessen the death-rate of your population, will now
come in aid of your sanitary progress.
It is inseparable from Science that it must advance.
The knowledges which are ministerial to
Medicine have in the last few years grown more
than in as many preceding generations; and the
fruitage of that stately tree begins to give evidence
of its widelier-spreading roots. If among these
results there may be counted many an improvement
in the curative treatment of disease, surely at least
equal progress may be predicted for those other and
still higher functions of our art, which relate to the
*In my Fifth Annual Report I described at some length the
routine here adverted to. For the convenience of those who
may wish to examine it in detail, I append to my present Report
the chief tabular forms which have been in use for the various
purposes of my office.