Public recognition of the nature and requirements of the problems of rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease has lagged far behind the attention given to other diseases of less numerical and economic importance. Some reasons for this attitude are as follows: Because limited facilities compel those in charge of public health services to consider how they may best expend funds, other pressing problems offer better opportunities for effective control. Death-dealing epidemic diseases earliest required reporting because quarantine measures often limited their spread. Again, discovery of a specific etiologic agent is a factor in making a disease notifiable, witness the discovery of the tubercle bacillus; but a review of the history of notification of tuberculosis reveals how slow has been the attainment of our approximately exact statistical knowledge concerning this disease, which today is probably not more than 75 per cent accurate, at least in respect to morbidity. Even less exact