In his first report to the Privy Council, Mr. Simon stated “that more than half of our annual mortality results from diseases which prevail with a very great range of difference in proportion as sanitary circumstances are bad or good; that, according to the latest available evidence, some of these diseases prevail twice or thrice, some of them ten or twenty times, some of them even forty or fifty times, as fatally in some districts as in other districts of England; that the result of their excessive partial development is to render the mortality of certain districts from 50 to 100 per cent. higher than the mortality of other districts, and to raise the death-rate of the whole country 33 per cent. above the death-rate of its healthiest parts.” In his eleventh report Mr. Simon was able to write as follows: “It would, I think, be difficult to over-estimate, in one most important point of view, the progress which, during the last few years, has been made in sanitary legislation. The principles now affirmed in our statute-book are such as, if carried into full effect, would soon reduce to quite an insignificant amount our present very large proportions of preventable disease.... Large powers have been given to local authorities, and obligation expressly imposed on them, as regards their respective districts, to suppress all kinds of nuisance, and to provide all such works and establishments as the public health primarily requires; while auxiliary powers have been given for more or less optional exercise in matters deemed of less than primary importance to health.... The State ... has interfered between parent and child ... between employer and employed ... between vendor and purchaser; has put restrictions on the sale and purchase of poisons; has prohibited in certain cases certain commercial supplies of water; and has made it a public offence to sell adulterated food, or drink, or medicine, or to offer for sale any meat unfit for human food.... Its care for the treatment of disease has not been unconditionally limited to treating at the public expense such sickness as may accompany destitution; it has provided that in any sort of epidemic emergency, organised medical assistance, not peculiarly for paupers, may be required of local authorities; and in the same spirit requires that vaccination at the public cost shall be given gratuitously to every claimant.” Mr. Simon has been a distinguished surgeon to St. Thomas’s Hospital, and attained some years ago the Presidency of the College of Surgeons. He is also a member of the General Medical Council. In 1878 his bust in marble was presented to the College of Surgeons by public subscription, in recognition of his eminent services in sanitary science. FOOTNOTES: [24] See the _Lancet_, March 25, 1876, p. 481. [25] _Medical Times and Gazette_, March 25, 1876, p. 348. [26] _Lancet_, July 8, 1876, p. 41, supplement to Harveian Oration. [27] See Photographs of Eminent Medical Men, ii, 59. INDEX.