Half a century has elapsed since the appointment of Max von Pettenkofer as the first professor of hygiene in any university, and the establishment of the first institute for the study of hygiene, at the University of Munich, in 1865. The subject of hygiene is now familiar, not only among physicians, in connection with the establishment of schools of hygiene attached to the medical departments of many of our universities and leading to special degrees or diplomas, but also in popular discussions of the public health. One may forget, therefore, that the beginnings of this modern scientific discipline, in the broader sense in which it is now understood, belong within the memory of many still living.
It would be unfair to contend that there was no interest in the questions here involved prior to von Pettenkofer's time.1 In England the same science was being developed under the name of