Early Health Departments

To the Editor:—  I note the article in the June 30, 1969 issue of The Journal, titled "WHO to Honor the First State Health Department." There is something awry in the title since it refers to the wrong state.Early partisans of the northeastern part of the country declared Massachusetts as having established the first state board of health in the United States. More recent research in US history of public health has established that Louisiana had the first state board of health, being created 14 years prior to the Massachusetts board, that is, 1855.The Louisiana State Board of Health was organized in the midst of a raging controversy over the contradictory epidemiological theories of the natural history of yellow fever—whether spread by importation of the contagion or whether by miasma generated by local unsanitary conditions. The law therefore which established the board was written in rather broad terms,