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MEDICAL REPORT.
"Mr. Chairman & Gentlemen, - It is a gratification to me to
know that I have the honour to address a Board of which the members
are not indifferent even to a cold and dull report of our proceedings
in sanitary works —not uninterested in the short and slow, and
often intercepted, steps by which we are advancing in the way oi
what must be at last one of the most universal of all our national
blessings. For, with all the drawbacks and checks which occur to
???s, we are yet achieving steady progress in the work of making life
more durable and health more undisturbed ; and, though our gain is
not great as we calculate it month by month, or year by year, yet
we may enjoy the conviction that our course is a sure and safe one
which will probably give to our descendants at some distant time a
condition of enjoyment which it would be at present regarded only
as a dream of fancy to describe.
But we have, meanwhile, in the vast and complicated measures
of our sanitary reform many obstacles which we are sure to meet
with. Multitudes of persons and of things, mounds of prejudice and
???ignorance and neglect will be continually setting impediments in the
way of our scientific arrangements. A very lamentable example of
this antagonism forces itself before our notice in the Report which
I have to make to you concerning the past year. If there is one
great scourge of our physical nature which, more than another, we
lave already learned the means of mitigating and defeating of its
leadlieet results, it is undoubtedly the small-pox by means of vaccilation.
"Well—in common with the other districts of this metropolis
—we have had a visitation of the dire disease, and the Union has
ost by it thirteen lives. But, the crying shame is, that, of these
???hirteen persons who were destroyed, nine had never had the degree
of protection given to them which vaccination is admitted to afford.
Their lives were exposed to the known and impending danger without
the protection of a known, and not easily penetrated shield.