general, public health and marine hospital service." (Act of Congress approved July 1, 1902.) He is a member of the board of visitors of the Government Hospital for the Insane, and also a member of the medical board of Providence Hospital, at Washington, District of Columbia. He presided over the first General International sanitary convention of the American Republics, and is chairman of the International sanitary bureau.
It is not easy to estimate in thought, much less to sum up in language, the humane results of such a life-career as that of Doctor Wyman. His work has been not merely similar to that of other physicians, who alleviate the sufferings of disease and whose labors are of a remedial and curative nature. But he has been beforehand with diseases, and in particular with those of a peculiarly contagious and dreaded character. Every citizen owes him a debt of gratitude for warding off at the very gates and portals of the national life the scourges which threaten to descend upon our Western shores from the dense and vitiated populations of the Orient and of Southern Europe. This he did notably during the cholera epidemic of 1892; for he is the author of a circular signed by President Harrison, declaring a quarantine of twenty days on all vessels bringing immigrants to our shores. This stopped immigration for the time being; and that was the result desired. It was a practical measure; and in the next year the peril to the United States was largely abated by the passage of the quarantine act of 1893. It was at his suggestion that the bacteriological laboratory was established; and the Fort Stanton sanitarium was also his project. The deck hands on our Western rivers and the oyster-men of Chesapeake Bay owe to his watchful oversight and interposing care their relief from severe cruelties imposed on them by their employers. He obtained necessary legislation for the deck hands on Western rivers and established relief stations for the crews of oyster vessels.
He has been instrumental in the passage of many acts of legislation which relate to his department—among others, an act dated March 2, 1899, authorizing a commission for the investigation of leprosy in the United States. The investigations of this commission were published in senate document No. 269, that session. He organized the yellow fever institute, whose bulletins, both scientific and graphic in character, embody all of our principal knowledge concerning this disease.
