The Policy and Practice of Glasgow in the Management of Epidemic Diseases, with Results

community shape themselves out in response to the "-increasingly complex conditions of its life; but it is only after many trials and many failures that the various functions necessary to be performed are properly distributed and discharged. The care of the public health in a city is one of the most important of these functions. It concerns every class, in all circumstances. Yet it will be found, especially in old countries, where municipal development has followed internal local impulses through many centuries, that the proper differentiation of this function is more slowly attained than that of any other. The reason seems to be this, that there is something in public health, and the measures required for its conservation, more or less akin to the objects of several of the departmental organisations of a community which come into existence prior to the recognition of the public health as an imperious subject of administration. The tendency, therefore, naturally is to try each of these organisations in succession, as the organ of this new function, or to distribute the function among them, deriving a little