thing to do was to appoint an officer known as a _Health Officer_, or
a committee known as a _Board of Health_, in each town and in each
county, whose business it should be to find out cases of infectious
disease, and to warn other people against them.

These officers first ask all the doctors in the town to report to this
Central Health Office, or Board of Health, every case of a patient
with an infectious disease. Then, when the case has been reported,
that office sends some one with a card on which the name of the
disease is printed in large letters, and he tacks the card upon the
front of the house or upon the fence around the lot, so that everyone
who goes near the house may know that there is danger, and keep away
from it. Then, sometimes, a messenger from the Board of Health goes
into the house and talks to the family, and tells them how they can
keep the patient in a room by himself, so as to prevent the rest of
the family from catching the disease; and how they can best take care
of the patient, and keep from carrying the infection through clothing
or food or anything else.

[Illustration: ONE WAY IN WHICH THE BOARD OF HEALTH PROTECTS US]

Then, because anyone who has been sick with an infectious disease will
still be shedding the germs of the disease and spitting or coughing,
not only as long as he is sick, but for two or three weeks after he is
beginning to feel better, the messenger will tell the family that the
patient must stay either in his own room or within his own house or
yard, for so many days or weeks. This is called keeping _quarantine_.
The word comes from the Italian word _quaranta_, "forty"; because in
the early days when the practice was first begun, the patients used to
be kept by themselves in this way for forty days. While sometimes this