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DORMAN B. EATON THE ESSENTIAL CONDITIONS OF GOOD SANITARY ADMINISTRATION Editor's Note Dorman B. Eaton (1823-99) was a Vermonter who spent most of his adult life in New York, where he practiced law until 1870. Prior to his retirement he was already actively engaged in the health reform movement. Along with Stephen Smith, he helped draft the Metropolitan Health Bill, and he worked hard for its passage. He preceded Smith in testifying before the legislature in Albany on the necessity for a health department that was independent of party pressures and political spoils. From 1870 until his death at the end of 1899 Eaton played significant parts in two other reform movements, that of city government and civil service. In recognition of his work to abolish the spoils system in government appointments President Grant named Eaton chairman of the Civil Service Commission in1873. He then played a major role in drafting the Pendleton Act of 1883, establishing the modern civil service system. Eaton was one of the original members of the American Public Health Association when it was founded in 1872. Thus it was natural that he should speak on his specialty, public health law, at one of the early meetings. Eaton demonstrated that he was also a student of comparative sanitary legislation in his pamphlet, Sanitary Legislation in England and New York (New York: Amerman, 1872.) Bibliographical Note A full biography of Eaton is needed. His role in civil service reform has been described by Ari Hoogenboom in Outlawing the Spoils, A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-83, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1961. Sanitary administration is relatively good when on the level of the general intelligence, but is absolutely good only when it accomplishes whatever is within the power of government, reasonably exercised, to promote the health and Reports and Papers, A.P.H.A. 2 (1874-75): 498-514. A discourse at the annual meeting in Baltimore, November 9, 1875. 293 294 HYGIENE preserve the lives of a people. Such administration implies and must be sanctioned by judicious and comprehensive sanitary laws. What, then, in this country are the essential conditions of such administration ? I answer, the following three, and I propose to offer a contribution in aid of securing them: 1. That a majority of the people, or those whose advice this majority will follow, have an adequate conception of the true meaning and scope of sanitary laws and administration. 2. That such majority, or its accepted advisers,have faith in sanitary precautions and adequate knowledge how to devise and apply them. 3. That effective methods in harmony with our constitutions, social conditions , and ideas of justice and policy, be provided by statute for securing the cooperation of persons of the most instructed intelligence and the highest sense of public duty, in aid of such administration. These conditions, true theoretically, will be found equally true when considered in reference to the present condition of sanitary intelligence, faith, and administration in this country. No competent judge, I venture to think, can look into the crude, shallow, arbitrary, and heterogeneous mass of laws and ordinances which are nominally in force in a majority of the municipalities of this country, or compare the statutes recently enacted in various States for creating State Boards of Health, without being painfully impressed with the conviction that the conditions named exist only among a small portion of the people of the United States. Indeed, were it not for the growing spirit of inquiry among the people on the subject of public health, for the more comprehensive legislation and the larger supply of pecuniary means to that end during the last few years, and especially were it not for the enlightened zeal and self-sacrifice of the medical profession, all of which this Association has promoted, and the last of which it nobly illustrates, in aid of sanitary reform, the actual condition in many quarters would be as discouraging as it is disgraceful. In not a small proportion of the states, the condition of the law and administration on the great subject of the public health, and to a large extent on the subject of general morality and prosperity, as dependent upon the public health, is far behind that of the more enlightened states and nations, and is discreditable to our institutions. We must, in view of it, adopt one of these conclusions: either that the majority of the people do not know how great a portion of the premature...

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