Dr. Parkes on Sanitary Progress

August 1873, remarked :? " If, as I believe, the art of ,cure has really advanced greatly in the last forty years, the art of prevention has also made great progress, and this has certainly arisen from the improvement in diagnosis. The recognition of a disease, and its reference to a particular category. inevitably lead the mind to probe its causes. This seems an instinct of our nature, probably divinely implanted to impel us in the path of knowledge and improvement. We cannot rest satisfied with seeing the thing; we must know its origin. Hence, during the last forty years has arisen the school of the sanitarinns, whose creed is that every disease, as we see it, has its antecedent, and that the problem they have to solve is to reach this antecedent?to prevent the seed from bearing its fruit. Either in the action of external nature, or in social habits, or in nutritive conditions, or in conditions proper to the individual and arising from his mind or mode of thought, the seeds of disease are sought, and by degrees the conviction is gaining ground among all classes that we have ourselves to thank for a large number of those maladies which destroy health, embitter life, and rob us of the blessings which, we feel, ought really to be ours. I need not say to what proportions this belief has grown, and how it is beginning to affect every class in the community ; but it is only right to point out how directly it springs from the progress of medical science. Let us hope that, as preventive medicine is really the child of curative medicine, and is indissolubly linked to it, those who are conducting the vast plans which the Legislature has devised for improving the national health may remember that the profession which has so far searched out the causes of individual and national ill-health must be entrusted with the execution of the plans and with the continued search into a subject which is yet almost in its infancy." If our readers will refer to page 189 of our volume for 1872, they will find that views almost identical witli these were then strongly propounded by another sanitarian of great weight and experience?Professor Gairdner of Glasgow. On the other hand, we are told by a gentleman holding high sanitary office in this country, that " it is a common but very mistaken notion that valuable information and suggestions on sanitaiy matters can