In addition to the rules and regulations prescribed by the general statutes, modern sanitary science has developed so broadly throughout most of the civilized states and countries, that the different governments have established state boards of health, and in many instances local boards of health, the latter being limited in their authority and operation to specific municipal divisions, to which boards the government has committed the power to pass certain sanitary rules and regulations, which rules and regulations may have an important bearing upon and relation to the practice of medicine and surgery. The jurisdiction and powers of these boards are to be found in the special statutes creating them, and prescribing their powers and duties, and cannot be treated of extensively here. They will be considered further under the special subjects to which they relate. _Physicians Bound to Report Contagious Cases and Not Liable for Mistaken Report._—The duty to promptly report[161] to boards of health every case of contagious or infectious disease is manifest. CHAPTER III. OF THE CONTRACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN PHYSICIAN AND PATIENT. EMPLOYMENT AND RIGHTS IN REGARD TO COMPENSATION. _Legal Character of the Employment._—Whatever may have been the theories of the Roman civil law, and following it of the early English common law, as to the character of the employment of physicians and other professional men, it is now so well settled that the reciprocal duties and obligations arising between physician and patient, or attorney and client, and the like, are to be classed under and governed by the law of contracts, that any extended discussion of these theories is unnecessary here.[162] Mr. Ordronaux, in the second chapter of his interesting work on the “Jurisprudence of Medicine,” has considered them fully, and has quoted amply from the books of the earlier and later text-writers, and from the expressions of the judges, to show what these theories and rules were; and he and all later authorities agree that the ancient notion, that professional services are always gratuitous unless a special contract to pay for them is made, has long been abandoned. He observes (pp. 13 and 14): “But in our day the increase in the number of professional practitioners, and their exclusive devotion to a special class of services as a means of living, has essentially modified the practical character of the contracts with their patrons. Although in legal acceptation a mandate, yet from force of circumstances growing out of an altered state of society, the _mandate_ is practically changed into a contract of hire (_locatio operis_). _This doubtless reduces professions to the status of artisanship_, and places them on a par with manual labor, conjoined to the special skill of a particular calling. But it also simplifies the contract, removes it from the category of innominate or imperfect obligations, requiring the intervention of legal fictions to furnish