The Section on State Medicine has two feet upon which it securely stands—law and science. My immediate predecessors as Chairman of the Section have noted the recent progress in science as connected with its practical work. On this occasion I shall, with great brevity, note progress in the other direction. As in America all law depends upon the sovereign will of the people, who are at once governors and governed, my topic is substantially "Popular Progress in State Medicine."
This progress is one of the great features of the present century, which is as signally characterized by the application of the physical forces to the daily uses of man as was the fifteenth by the unfolding of the globe's map. Thirty years ago sanitary ideas, problems, reforms and work were unknown, or at all events unmentioned, To-day, outside of partisan politics with its perquisites, no topics engross so large a