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SUGGESTIONS FOR SANITARY ORGANIZATION. 75
kind of detailed and precise information which is
most serviceable to your Officer of Health, in guiding
him to those more general and comprehensive
conclusions which it is his business to lay before
you. These gentlemen are the habitual medical
attendants of the poorer classes; day by day, in
the unobtrusive beneficence of their calling, they
pass from house to house, and from court to court
—the constant recipients of complaint, or the constant
observers of ground of complaint—amid all
that destitute population on whose condition you
require to be informed. They are in the constant
presence of the pestilences which reign in our
worst localities; they are the chief treaters of
endemic disease within the City—of that disease
which, by its proportion, measures the success of
sanitary changes, or indicates their failure; and it
has been the professional education of these gentlemen,
as it is their business, to trace such effects to
their causes. Their reports would be the authenticated
statements of experienced medical practitioners,
familiarly conversant with their several
respective localities.
If it were your wish and object, with utter indifference
to expense, to organize the best scheme
for laying before yourselves from time to time a
succession of accurate and trustworthy reports on
the state of health, and condition of dwellings, in
the several districts of the City;—if you were willing
to engage a large number of non-medical