alone is said to cost the country half a billion annually, typhoid
over three hundred million, and so on. The cost in suffering, broken
lives, and broken hearts is beyond computation.

There are many different ways in which the campaign for public health
can be simultaneously waged:

(1) The enforcement of quarantine laws, vaccination, and fumigation,
should be much stricter than it is in many parts of the nation. By
such means the cholera, bubonic plague, and other terrible diseases
have been practically kept out of the country, and smallpox has become,
from one of the most dreaded scourges, an almost negligible peril.
Experience shows strikingly the advantage of isolating patients
suffering from contagious diseases; here at least the State, in the
interest of the community as a whole, must sternly limit individual
liberty. And it looks as if we were at the threshold of an era of
"vaccination" for other diseases besides smallpox; typhoid is now
absolutely preventable by that means, and the number of diseases
amenable to prevention or mitigation by similar methods is yearly
increasing. In some or all of these cases there is a slight risk to
the patient, in view of which compulsory "vaccination" is in some
quarters strenuously opposed. Leaving the discussion of the principle
here involved to chapter XXVIII, we may confidently say, at least,
that voluntary inoculation against diseases is an increasingly valuable
safeguard not only for the individual in question but for the whole
community.

(2) Apart from state action, voluntary organizations formed to attack
specific diseases, by spreading popular knowledge of preventive
measures, and pushing legislation for their enforcement, offer much