ï~~,Mel 1qopido3 *sn Aq pepeolod eq Aew pue Ap.ed PJ!Lf a Aq OUPoipej AJJ l wqq te8N aL Jo UO!138003 eq~ wou peidos seM abed S!Lf uo ~p~we~;,. 36 REPORT OF STATE BOARD OF HEALTH "Where there is no vision, the people die," said a prophet of old. As knowledge increases, as science pushes still farther her firm basis of established facts, the vision does not fail, it becomes real, practical, founded upon actual conditions, not on fancy. For 'centuries people sought and longed for a fountain which would bring eternal youth. We know now that no such foundation ever will be found, that no magic formula can undo the consequences of the past or turn back time. But we also know that sane living, hygienic conditions, aided by the scientific discoveries of thousands of patient, hard working members of the profession will lengthen life, will avert count less unnecessary tragedies, will make life have a realer, deeper meaning for hundreds of thousands. It is a field of work as broad as life, as deep as human sympathy. To those who can see aright, the formal tables telling of reduced death rates, of a few years added to the span of life, are vibrant with meaning. They show that thousands of mothers have been saved from the anguish of losing their little ones, that the saving of the life or health of the breadwinner will permit the men and women of the future to grow up in comfortable surroundings and with chance for development, instead of being cramped by poverty and lack of opportunity. The final test of any work must be: "Is the total of human misery less, the sum of human happiness greater because of it"? Judged by this standard there can be no task more worth while than to bonserve the health of a great state. This is what the Oklahoma Statd Board of Health is trying to do. REPORT OF STATE BOARD O IHALTH3 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBLIC HEALTH WORK (Dr. John W. Duke, State Health Commissioner.) To those who read history in the effort to see and appreciate its inner meaning and real' significance it often seems that each age or period has been inspired by a particular ideal, that looking back through the turmoil of wars, the intrigues of rulers, the other striking but superficial events, one can say that the development of the human race, the trend of human progress during that period was along certain definite lines. The direction of this current of progress can be traced through the' age which saw Columbus and the extension of man's vision to worldwide borders, through the Renaissance with the 'widening of man's intellectual ideals in every direction, through the period of mental unrest which culminated in the French Revolution, the AmeTican Declaration of Independence and the modern ideas of liberty and the rights of mankind which have since obtained. The Nineteenth Century was emphatically the age of the machine. 'At its beginning steam was in its infancy; electricity was unknown; man progressed slowly from place to place on foot or by the use of 'horses, the same means of transportation which had been in use before cities were known, even before man had gathered, together into tribal Communities. At its close the railrdad, had made distance a little thing, time and space were conquered by the telegraph and telephone, Marconi was working on the wireless and the Wright brothers on aviatipn, in every field the efficiency of mankind had been i-ncreased a hundred fold. To the men and women who are working for the betterment of public health the hope has often come that the Twentieth Century may be marked by the perfecting not of machines of steel and iron, but of that infinitely more complicated and more important machine, the human body. A great work in that direction already has been done; it is small, however, to what remains, to what is possible. No great work is possible without the inspiration of an ideal, but no work can be more inspiring than this. To those who can understand, the tables of statistics showing a decrease in the death rate, the lengthening for a few years of the span. of human life are not dull and tiresome. They are vibrant with life 0