searching investigation. They were A. B. Palmer and C. L. Ford, of the University of Michigan, and Pliny Earle, Superintendent of the Northampton Insane Asylum, and after several months their fearless and exhaustive report was published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and in pamphlet form. It created a profound sensation; but lest the proprietor of that school should be thought a "sinner above all others," it should be recalled that these were days prehistoric to sanitation, and that a bulky volume might be made up of the stories of epidemics caused by unsanitary conditions connected with schools and colleges. The man who had instigated the investigation was no enemy, but had been friend, trustee, and patron of the school from its foundation, but he was of the fiat-justitia-ruat-cœlum type, and the findings of the report, which proved that on those beautiful grounds, and only there, save in the case of day pupils who had been subjected to the same poison, was there any typhoid fever, sank deep into his heart. We quote one of the closing sentences: "To whatever extent the ignorance of sanitary laws may shield the violator from moral responsibility, it will not abate the physical penalty of such violation. This will fall with the same force upon the unconscious, the ignorant, the helpless, and morally innocent, as upon the intelligent, the powerful, and the wicked. . . . To prevent the poison of typhoid fever, when taken into the system, from producing its legitimate effects, except by natural agencies, would require as positive a miracle as to restore a severed head, or arrest the course of the heavenly bodies. Instead of closing our eyes and soothing our minds by casting the responsibility of a great calamity upon Providence, we should look to the physical conditions producing it, and see if these conditions are remediable." Some people thought these declarations of the preventability of disease by human agency bordered on the blasphemous, but the thought was "in the air." Dr. Budd, of Bristol, in England, had traced epidemics of typhoid directly to infected drinking water; and Dr. Austin Flint's classical study of the outbreak near Buffalo, N. Y., convinced medical men of its preventability, as well as here and there a progressive layman, but they all saw that only organized, concerted effort, fortified by law, could effect this exemption. Mr. Plunkett was chosen to the Legislature in 1868, and made some tentative efforts looking to a State Board, but the time was not auspicious. He was again a member in 1869, and in a faction fight in the dominant party had been able to render the candidate who was finally seated as Speaker an important service, and naturally the gentleman so seated was "willing to oblige," etc. Among the members were three physicians, and some other broad-minded progressive men; and rather late in the session, the motion was made to appoint a
