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"General Plan for Promotion of Public and Personal Health," or the "Shattuck Report," is released.

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This report is initiated by concerned government officials in Massachusetts. It creates new standards for sanitation and cleanliness that will become central to public health ideologies in the U.S. Written by Lemuel Shattuck, it covers the construction of buildings, waste disposal, the pollution of streams and the atmosphere, the control of communicable diseases, and more. It demonstrates that Shattuck did not believe in germ theory but in the "miasma" theory of illness.

It also represents the first systematic use of birth and death records to assess the health of a population. A century later, the Journal of the American Medicine Association (JAMA) will report: "Most notable was its proposal for [the] creation of state and local boards of health, which were then nonexistent...The Shattuck recommendations regarding vital statistics, community sanitation, health of the school child, training of nurses, house and slum clearance and medical research are still the principal areas in which medical progress is being made today" (JAMA, 1949).