Excerpt from The Chances of Death and the Ministry of Health

The present annual death rate of the United States is only per against a rate of in 1880. The saving in years of life in conse quence of a declining death rate is so enormous for a vast country like ours that the true meaning of statistical calculations can hardly be made intelligent to the average mind. Sooner or later every one must die, but the question is one of how long, on the average, each life can be made to last, when a gulf greater than the Atlantic or the Pacific separates the people who in one section live to an average age of 45 and in another to 60. Life tables illustrate with scientific precision God's law as applied to the tenure of man's existence on earth, but what is'called the law of mortality is rather a symbolic expression of the law which governs all collective phenomena in the order of logical sequence, without which human ex istence, and in fact all existence, would be chaos. A study of mortality problems reveals more accurately than many another branch of science the marvels of life in the aggregate as conditioned by the more or less perfect coordination of the units, whether merely physically considered or also in the broader sense of the psychological, moral and spiritual. The duration of life is determined by an almost infinite number of variants and even the wisest fail in the attempt to comprehend the whole. The diseases which afflict mankind are numerous, but most of the waste of life is due to a comparatively small number of causes, chiefly, in our own country, tuberculosis of the lungs, accounting for per cent. Of the whole; organic diseases of the heart accounting for per cent.; acute nephritis and Bright's disease, accounting for per cent.;pneumonia, accounting for per cent.; and cancer, accounting for per cent. These six causes alone are responsible for per cent. Of the entire mortality. Other diseases, now largely under control but intrinsically as serious a menace to community life as any of those men tioned, are typhoid fever, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, etc. The typhoid death rate, which is typical of sanitary progress or neglect, has declined in American' cities from an average of 51 per of population during the decade ending with 1892 to 25, or just about one-half, during the decade ending with 1912; but our typhoid fever rate is still excessive and no cause of death perhaps illustrates better the lamentable amount of still existing municipal neglect. Tuberculosis, the foe of mankind for, ages, the disease par excellence, considered a visitation of, God, has, during the last generation, been brought within the range of human control, with a fair prospect that within a measurable period of time its ravages will be reduced still more than has been the case in the recent past. The tuberculosis death rate of American cities during the decade ending with 1882 was 318 per of population, but the rate during the last decade was only 182. Within more recent years the mortality from smallpox has been reduced from an average of during the five years ending with 1905 to a rate of only or about one-tenth of the earlier rate, during. The year 1912. The mortality from the dread diseases of infancy, diphtheria and croup, has been reduced from an average of during the five years ending with 1905 to during the year 1912. We have no deaths from Asiatic cholera, nor from plague, except at quarantine stations subject to Federal control; either they are isolated or their introduction into this country is practically made impossible by means - of a national health adminis tration which challenges the admiration of the world. Yellow fever is no longer the foe of southern states, and we have had practically no deaths from the disease since 1905. Of leprosy we have a few cases annually, but excepting the well known leper settlements in Louisiana, there is slight danger to the country of a recrudescenc