It is a striking testimony to the skill and care with which these duties are performed that, with receptions in a normal year, we will say, of 200,000 persons, and with some 15,000 serious cases treated annually in hospital, of both sexes, and some 25,000 under continuous medical treatment for seven days or over, the death-rate in prison should be generally less than ·50 per 1,000 receptions. Our prisons have been described by a high medical authority as among the best sanatoria in England. This praise is well deserved, but it does not mean that illness is rare or only trivial, but that the skill, industry, and patience of the medical staff, operating in healthy sanitary conditions, equipped with modern knowledge and resource in dealing with the great variety of disease, which diagnosis on reception, or individual care during detention, reveals, is effective in maintaining a high standard of general health with a comparatively low death-rate, so far as prison conditions admit a comparison with the general death-rate of England and Wales. For instance heart disease, pneumonia, and phthisis claim a regular roll of victims, though, in most cases, death would be due to chronic complaints in old, or prematurely old persons, with broken-down constitutions. The incidence of infectious disease in prisons has, for some years past, been remarkably low. In a prison community, any illness of an infectious character is naturally viewed with great apprehension, and is always made the subject of strict inquiry--the danger of infection being, of course, very great when so many persons are daily received and brought into association at chapel, exercise, labour, &c. Against this danger, the chief prophylactic must be in the exact and unerring skill of the Medical Officer, who is able to detect symptoms on reception which, unless detected, might spread an epidemic throughout the prison. Thus, at the time of the small-pox epidemic of 1902, it was due to the precautions taken that, with few exceptions, this highly infectious disease was prevented from spreading. When the epidemic of enteric fever raged at Lincoln in 1905, not a single case occurred in the prison, though prisoners were being received daily from various parts of the city. Erysipelas is disease which is not uncommon in prisons in the early days of imprisonment. Prisoners are not infrequently received with cut hands and other wounds in a neglected or septic condition, and with a probable predisposition to the disease arising from a weak or unhealthy physical condition. Isolation, and the usual precautions, however, generally prevent the disease, which has a tendency to recur, from spreading.