Many of the sanitary and clinical institutions in the Republic have medical schools or classes attached, and such are naturally much better equipped with special departments for the eye, ear, nose, throat and skin diseases. Fever hospitals are carefully segregated, and are most carefully controlled, with the idea of avoiding any epidemic breaking out. Many of the attendant physicians have studied in Europe and the United States.
[Illustration: NEW NATIONAL PALACE AT SAN SALVADOR.]
[Illustration: THEATRE AT SANTA ANA, DEPARTMENT OF SANTA ANA.]
The Superior Council of Health, of which Don Tomás G. Palomo is President, has rendered important services during the last two years. The Government is continually encouraging authorities to persevere with their sanitary measures and to compel the public to follow the instructions periodically issued by the Superior Council, and to fulfil the rules laid down by the Code of Laws relating to health. In his report for the year 1907, the President of the Council has said: "In proportion as the sphere of action of the Council widens, so has its beneficial influence been remarked, especially in some places of the Republic, where formerly only the most rudimentary laws of hygiene were known. Already a large majority of the municipal authorities are showing some aptitude in ameliorating the sanitary conditions of their respective localities, and if things continue thus we shall soon arrive at the complete banishment of endemic maladies from certain districts of the Republic."
In Salvador a pernicious kind of malaria is the predominating disease, and shows itself in different phases and manifestations. The Council has recommended several measures to minimize its effects; but the result achieved does not altogether correspond to the efforts of the authorities, because, besides the heavy expenses of the sanitation works in many parts of the country, the majority of the people are opposed to all hygienic measures, and through poverty are condemned to live in small dwellings, which are badly ventilated and damp, and consequently unhealthy.
In the Capital, at the beginning of the year 1907, and at the time of the mobilization of the Army, several cases of cerebro-spinal meningitis presented themselves. Those soldiers who were afflicted were isolated during the march, first in a ward of the Rosalés Hospital, and afterwards in the Military Sanatorium. This measure and others that the Council promptly ordered prevented any development of the epidemic. In the same manner four cases of diphtheria presented themselves, and altogether, through different diseases, 1,598 deaths took place in San Salvador in that year. In the same period it recorded 2,147 births, giving as a net result an increase in population of 549 inhabitants.