The Surveillance of Communicable Diseases of National Importance

IN the introduction to his comprehensive report on the cholera epidemic of 1848–49, William Farr,1 that greatest of statistical epidemiologists, wrote, "If a foreign army had landed on the coast of England, seized all the seaports,. . . ravaged the population through the summer and. . . in the year it held possession of the country slain fifty-three thousand two hundred and ninety-three men, women and children,. . . the task of registering the dead would be inexpressibly painful; and the pain is not greatly diminished by the circumstance that in the calamity to be described the minister of destruction . . .