The body of educated physicians in a community forms the tribunal by which the work of sanitary officials is to be judged, and they cannot judge wisely unless they appreciate the difficulties with which health officials have to contend. If a city has an incompetent or dishonest board of health, the medical profession of that city are to a certain extent responsible for it; if a competent, energetic, and faithful sanitary officer is crippled and harassed or forced out of office because he is on the wrong side of politics, or because in the legitimate and proper exercise of his functions he has come in conflict with the interests of powerful and wealthy individuals or corporations, it is the duty of medical men to support him, and to do this actively and promptly. And I take great pleasure in being able to say, as the result of somewhat extended observation, that, as a rule, the physicians of this country do cheerfully and promptly co-operate with the sanitary authorities where such exist, and are the first to try to have them properly organized and given the necessary means and powers to do effective work. {213} DRAINAGE AND SEWERAGE IN THEIR HYGIENIC RELATIONS. BY GEO. E. WARING, JR. For reasons, sometimes sound and sometimes fanciful, the drainage question often presents itself to the medical practitioner as an annoying if not as a serious one. It is not necessary for the physician to make himself an adept in the art of sanitary drainage, but he can properly meet neither the demands of nervous patients nor the exigencies of sometimes serious situations without having an intelligent general idea concerning it. Not only to prescribe improvement, but frequently to allay ill-grounded apprehension, he should be able to address himself, intelligently and promptly, at least to the few simple problems presented in connection with ordinary houses. I use the expression "ill-grounded apprehension," not because the drainage in and about houses is generally tolerably good, for it is not, but because the race seems to have so inured itself to certain grave defects in plumbing-work that one may reasonably hesitate, and look elsewhere for the occasion of diseases before accusing the imperfect sanitary appliances of an average house. Anything like a treatise on the technical details of house-drainage would be quite out of place here. There are note-books easily accessible to such physicians as care to make a thorough study of the subject. It does seem worth while, however, to pass in careful review, in a work of this character, the various conditions of interior and exterior drainage upon which a physician is frequently called to pass judgment.