The president of Princeton University declares that for several decades we have given education that does not instruct and instruction that does not educate. Others tell us that because we read daily papers and magazines our minds become superficial, that our power to concentrate or memorize is weakened,—that we read so much of everything that we learn little of anything. As the habit of reading magazines and newspapers is constantly increasing, I think we must assume that it has come to stay. If we cannot check it, we can at least turn it to good advantage, systematize it, and discipline ourselves.
Among the subjects continually described in newspapers and magazines, and even on billboards and in street-car advertising, is the subject of hygiene. No greater service can be rendered the community than for those who are conducting discussions of health to teach people how to read correctly this mass of information regarding health, to separate misinformation from information, and to apply the lessons learned to personal and public hygiene. There is no better way of doing this than to teach a class or a child to clip out of magazines and newspapers all important references to health, and then to classify these under the subject-matter treated. A teacher, parent, or club leader might practice by using the classification of subjects outlined in the Contents of this book. It is surprising how rapidly one builds up a valuable collection serviceable for talks or papers, but more particularly for giving one a vital and intelligent interest in practical health topics.
Interested in comparing the emphasis placed on health topics in a three-cent paper having a small circulation with a penny paper having twenty times the circulation, I made during one week thirty-eight clippings from the three-cent paper and ninety-five from the penny paper. The high-priced paper had no editorial comment within the field of health, whereas the penny paper had three columns, in which were discussed among other things:The Economics of Bad Teeth;Need for Individual Efficiency;"Good Fellows" Lower Standard of Living by Neglecting their Families. The penny paper advertised fifty-two foods, garments, whiskies, patent medicines, or beautifiers urged upon health grounds. In the three-cent paper twenty-six out of thirty-eight items advertised food, clothing, patent medicine, or whisky. One issue of a monthly magazine devoted to woman's interests contained twenty-eight articles and editorials and fifty-five advertisements that concern health,—thirty-seven per cent of total reading matter and thirty-seven per cent of total advertisement.
Excellent discipline is afforded by this clipping work. It is astonishing how few men and women, even from our better colleges, know how to organize notes, clippings, or other data, so that they can be used a few weeks later. There is a satisfaction in seeing one's material grow, as is remembered by all of us, in making picture scrapbooks or collections of picture postal cards and stamps. "Collections" have generally failed for want of classification,—putting things of a kind together. Chronological arrangement is uninteresting because unprofitable. One never knows where to find a picture, or a stamp, or a health clipping. Clippings, like libraries, will be little used if not properly catalogued so that use is easy. If a health-clipping collection is attempted, there are four essentials: (1) arrangement by topic; (2) inclusion of advertisements; (3) inclusion of items from magazines; (4) cross references.
For classification, envelopes can be used or manila cards 10×12 inches. The teacher, parent, or advanced student will probably think the envelope most useful because most easily carried and filed,—most likely to be used. But clippings should be bound together in orderly appearance, or else it will be disagreeable working with them. Children, however, will like the pasting on sheets, which show clearly the growth of each topic. Envelopes or cards should not have clippings that deal with only one health topic. Unless a test is made to see how many health references there are in a given period, it should be made a rule not to clip any item that does not contain something new,—some addition to the knowledge already collected.
Advertisements will prove interesting and educative. When newspapers and magazines announce some new truth, the commercial motive of manufacturer or dealer sees profit in telling over and over again how certain goods will meet the new need. Children will soon notice that the worst advertisements appear in the papers that talk most of "popular rights," "justice," and "morality." They will be shocked to see that the popular papers accept money to tell falsehoods about fake cures. They will be pleased that the best monthly magazines contain no such advertisements. They will challenge paper or magazine, and thus will be enlisted while young in the fight against health advertisements that injure health.
To clip articles from magazines will seem almost irreverent at first. But the reverence for magazines and books is less valuable to education than the knowledge concealed in them. Except where families preserve all magazines, clippings will add greatly to their serviceability.
The art of cross-referencing is invaluable to the organized mind. The purpose of classifying one's information is not to show how much there is, but to answer questions quickly and to guide constructive thinking. A clipping that dealswithalcoholism,patent medicine, andtuberculosismust be posted in three places, or cross-referenced; otherwise it will be used to answer but one question when it might answer three. If magazines may not be cut, it will be easy to record the fact of a useful article by writing the title, page, and date on the appropriate index card, or inclosing a slip so marked in the proper envelope.
While it is true that the most important bibliography one can have in his private library is a classification of the material of which he himself has become a part while reading it, there are a number of health journals that one can profitably subscribe for. In fact, it is often true that the significant discoveries in scientific fields, or the latest public improvements, such as parks, bridges, model tenements, will not be appreciated until one has read in health journals how these improvements affect the sickness rate and the enjoyment rate of those least able to control their living conditions. The physician and nurse in their educational work for hospitals are distributors of health propaganda.
Wherever there is a local journal devoted to health, parents, teachers, educators, and club leaders would do well to subscribe and to hold this journal up to a high standard by quoting, thanking, criticising it. In New Jersey, for example, is a monthly called theNew Jersey Review of Charities and Correctionsthat deals with every manner of subject having to do with public health as well as with private and public morality and education.
A similar journal, intended for national instruction, isThe Survey, whose topical index for last year enumerates two hundred and thirty-two articles dealing with subjects directly connected with public hygiene, e.g.:
Schools, 6; school inspection, 3; eyes,—school children, 1; sex instruction in the schools, 2; psychiatric clinic, special children, 2; industrial education, 5; child labor, 18; playgrounds, 26; alley, crap, playing in streets, 3; labor conditions, 18;industrial accidents, 10; wage-earner's insurance, 4; factory inspection, 1; consumer's league, 3; women's work, 6; tuberculosis, 23; hospitals, dispensaries (social), 5; tenement reform, 10; living conditions, 2; baths, 1; public comfort stations, 2; lodging houses, 1; clean streets, 6; clean milk, 6; smoke, 1; noises, 1; parks, 1; patent medicines, 2; sanitary code, 1; mortality statistics, 2; social settlements and public health, 1; midwives, 1; children's bureau, 1; juvenile and adult delinquent, 25; dependent, defective, and insane, 7; blind, 5; cripples, 1; homes for aged, 1; inebriates, 3; Traveler's Aid Committee, 1; infant mortality, 2; social diseases, 2.
Schools, 6; school inspection, 3; eyes,—school children, 1; sex instruction in the schools, 2; psychiatric clinic, special children, 2; industrial education, 5; child labor, 18; playgrounds, 26; alley, crap, playing in streets, 3; labor conditions, 18;industrial accidents, 10; wage-earner's insurance, 4; factory inspection, 1; consumer's league, 3; women's work, 6; tuberculosis, 23; hospitals, dispensaries (social), 5; tenement reform, 10; living conditions, 2; baths, 1; public comfort stations, 2; lodging houses, 1; clean streets, 6; clean milk, 6; smoke, 1; noises, 1; parks, 1; patent medicines, 2; sanitary code, 1; mortality statistics, 2; social settlements and public health, 1; midwives, 1; children's bureau, 1; juvenile and adult delinquent, 25; dependent, defective, and insane, 7; blind, 5; cripples, 1; homes for aged, 1; inebriates, 3; Traveler's Aid Committee, 1; infant mortality, 2; social diseases, 2.
The National Hospital Record, theDietetic and Hygienic Gazette, theJournal of Nursing, are three other magazines primarily intended for nurses and physicians, but full of suggestive material for unprofessional readers. National magazines concerned with health, but seeking popular circulation, areGood HealthandPhysical Culture. In England there is a special magazine calledChildren's Diseases, which could be of great help to a school library for special reference. The same can be said of thePsychological Clinic,Pediatrics, and other technical journals published in this country. For many persons, to make the best use of any one copy of these magazines, clipping is of course impossible, but noting on a card or envelope is practicable.
Of late many of the national popular magazines have several columns devoted to health. We have not appreciated the educational possibilities of these columns. In most large cities there are monthly book reviews which may be profitably consulted in learning the new thought in the health field. If teachers would either write their experience or ask questions, if children knew that in a certain magazine or newspaper questions as to ventilation, bathing, exercise, would be answered, they would take a keen interest in the progress of discussions. The large daily papers make a great feature of their health hints. It is nottheir fault if questioners care more about cosmetics and hair bleaches than about the fresh-air cure of headaches. They will coöperate with teachers and parents in securing more general discussion of other problems than beauty doctoring.
Finally, persons wanting not only to have intelligence as to matters promoting health, but actually to exert a helpful influence in their community, ought to want the published reports of the mayor, health department, the public schools, and other institutions, noting carefully all that is said about conditions relating to health and about efforts made to correct all unfavorable conditions. The best literature of our day, with regard to social needs, appears in the reports of our public and private institutions and societies. Of increasing value are the publications of the national government printing office. Because it is no one's business to find out what valuable material is contained in such reports, and because no educational museum is comparing report with report, those who live nearest to our health problems and who see most clearly the health remedies, are not stimulated to give to the public their special knowledge in an interesting, convincing way.
Teaching children how to find health lessons in public documents will advance the cause of public ethics as well as of public health. At the New York State Conference of Charities, of 1907, one official complained that the physicians made no educational use of their valuable experience for public education. He stated that a study of medical journals and health articles in popular magazines revealed the fact that the number of papers prepared by physicians in state hospitals averaged one to a doctor for every five or six years of service. This state of affairs is even more exaggerated in strictly educational institutions. Columbia University has recently instituted a series of lectures to be given by its professors to its professors, so that they may have a general knowledge of the work being done in otherfields besides their own at their own university. This is equally important for teachers and heads of departments in elementary schools. It is now admitted by most educators that elementary schools and young children present more pedagogical difficulties and pressing biological problems than higher schools. If teachers and parents would realize that their method of solving the health problems that arise daily in the schoolroom and in the home would interest other mothers and teachers, their spirit of coöperation would soon be reflected in school journals, popular magazines, and daily newspapers.
"Men have died, from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love"—nor for work. Work of itself never killed anybody nor made anybody sick. Work has caused worry, mental strain, and physical breakdown, only when men while working have been deprived of air, sun, light, exercise, sleep, proper food at the proper time, opportunity to live and work hygienically. Fortunately for human progress, doing nothing brings ailments of its own and has none of the compensations of work. As the stomach deprived of substantial food craves unnatural food,—sweets, stimulants,—so the mind deprived of substantial, regular diet of wholesome work turns to unwholesome, petty, fantastic, suspicious, unhappy thoughts. This state of mind, combined with the lack of bodily exercise that generally accompanies it, reacts unfavorably on physical health. An editor has aptly termed the do-nothing condition as a self-inflicted confinement:
A great deal of the misery and wretchedness among young men that inherit great fortunes is caused by the fact that they are practically in jail. They have nothing to do but eat, drink, and enjoy themselves, and they cannot understand why their lives are dull.We have had the owner of a great railroad system pathetically telling the public that he is unhappy. That is undoubtedly true,because with all his race horses, and his yachts, and all the things that he imagines to be pleasures, he is not really doing anything.If he were running one little railroad station up the road, handling the freight, fussing about dispatches, living above the railroad station in two rooms, and buying shoes in a neighboring village for fifteen children he would be busy and happy.But he cannot be happy because he is in prison,—in a prison of money, a prison that is honorable because it gives him everything that he wants, and he wants nothing.
A great deal of the misery and wretchedness among young men that inherit great fortunes is caused by the fact that they are practically in jail. They have nothing to do but eat, drink, and enjoy themselves, and they cannot understand why their lives are dull.
We have had the owner of a great railroad system pathetically telling the public that he is unhappy. That is undoubtedly true,because with all his race horses, and his yachts, and all the things that he imagines to be pleasures, he is not really doing anything.
If he were running one little railroad station up the road, handling the freight, fussing about dispatches, living above the railroad station in two rooms, and buying shoes in a neighboring village for fifteen children he would be busy and happy.
But he cannot be happy because he is in prison,—in a prison of money, a prison that is honorable because it gives him everything that he wants, and he wants nothing.
A New York newspaper that circulates among the working classes where young men and women are inclined to associate health and happiness with doing nothing recently gave two columns to "Dandy Jim," the richest dog in the world. Dandy Jim's mistress left him a ten-thousand-dollar legacy. During his lifetime he wore diamonds. Every day he ate candy that cost eighty cents a pound. The coachman took him driving in the park sunny afternoons. He had no cares and nothing to work for. His food came without effort. He had fatty degeneration of the vital organs. He was pampered, coddled, and killed thereby. Thousands of men and women drag out lives of unhappiness for themselves and others because, like Dandy Jim, they have nothing to work for, are pampered, coddled victims of fatty degeneration. When President Butler of Columbia University finds it necessary to censure "the folly and indifference of the fathers, vanity and thoughtless pride of the mothers" who encourage do-nothing ailments; and when the editor of thePsychological Clinicprotests that the fashionable private schools and the private tutor share with rich fathers and mothers responsibility for life failures,—it is time that educators teach children themselves the physical and moral ailments and disillusions that come from doing nothing.
Ten years ago a stenographer inherited two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Her dream of nothing to dowas realized. She gave up her strenuous business life. Possessions formerly coveted soon clogged her powers of enjoyment. She imagined herself suffering from various diseases, shut herself up in her house, and refused to see any one. She grew morbid and was sure that every person who approached her had some sneaking, personal, hostile motive. Though always busy, she accomplished little. Desultory work, procrastination, and self-indulgence destroyed her power of concentration. She could not think long enough on one subject to think it out straight, therefore she was constantly deceived in her friends and interests. She first trusted everybody, then mistrusted everybody. Infatuation with every new acquaintance was quickly followed by suspicion. For years she was a very sick woman, a victim of do-nothing ailments.
Doing nothing has of late been seriously recommended to American business men. They are advised to retire from active work as soon as their savings produce reasonable income. It is true, this suggestion has been made as an antidote to greed rather than for the happiness of the business man. What retiring from business is apt to mean, is indicated by a gentleman who at the age of sixty decided to sell his seat on the New York Stock Exchange and to enjoy life. He became restless and very miserable. He threw himself violently into one thing after another; in less than a year he became an ill, broken old man, after trying vainly to buy back his business.
Both mind and body were made to work. The function of the brain is to think to a purpose, just as the function of the heart is to pump blood. The habit of doing nothing is very easily formed. The "out-of-work" soon become "the work-shy." Having too little to do is worse for the body and mind than having too little to eat. Social reformers emphasize the bad effect on society of vagrancy. Evils of indiscriminate relief to the poor are vividly described yearafter year. The philanthropist is condemned, who, by his gifts, encourages an employee's family to spend what they do not earn, and to shun work. Yet the idleness of the tramp, street loafer, and professional mendicant is a negligible evil compared with the hindrance to human progress caused by the idleness of the well-to-do, the rich, the educated, the refined, the "best" people. It is as much a wrong to bring up children in an atmosphere of do-nothingism, as to refuse to have their teeth attended to or to have glasses fitted to weak eyes.
From the point of view of community welfare it is far more serious for the rich child to be brought up in idleness or without a purpose than for the poor child to become a public charge. Not only has society a right to expect more from rich children in return for the greater benefits they enjoy, but so long as rich children control the expenditure of money, they control also the health and happiness of other human beings. Unless taught the value and joy of wholesome work they cannot themselves think straight, nor are they likely to want to understand how they can use their wealth for the benefit of mankind. To quote President Butler again:
The rich boy who receives a good education and is trained to be a self-respecting member of the body politic might in time share on equal terms the chance of the poor boy to become a man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, and too often of decadence.
The rich boy who receives a good education and is trained to be a self-respecting member of the body politic might in time share on equal terms the chance of the poor boy to become a man of genuine influence and importance on his own account, just as now by the neglect, or worse, of his parents the very rich boy is apt to be relegated to the limbo of curiosities, and too often of decadence.
Nervous invalids make life miserable for themselves and for others, when often their sole malady is lack of the right kind of work to do.
Suiting work to interest and interest to work is an economy that should not be overlooked. The energyspent in forcing oneself to do a distasteful task can be turned to productive channels when work is made pleasurable. The fact is frequently deplored that whereas formerly a man became a full-fledged craftsman, able to perform any branch of his trade, he is now confined to doing special acts because neither his interest nor his mind is called into play. Work seems to react unfavorably on his health. He has not the pride of the artisan in the finished product, for he seldom sees it. He does a task. His employer is a taskmaster. He decides that work is not good for him as easily as when a school-boy he grasped the meaning of escape from his lessons. By failing to fit studies to a student's interest, or by failing to insure a student's interest in his studies, schools and colleges miseducate young men and young women to look upon all work as tasks, as discipline, necessary but irksome, and to be avoided if possible. Just as there is a way of turning all the energy of the play instinct into school work, so there is a way of interesting the factory and office worker in his job. However mechanical work may be, there is always the interest in becoming the most efficient worker in a room or a trade. Routine—accurate and detailed work—does not mean the stultification of the imagination. It takes more imagination to see the interesting things in statistical or record work than to write a novel. Therefore employers should make it a point to help their employees to realize the significance of the perfection of each detail and the importance of each man's part. The other day a father said to me, "I want my boys to be as ashamed to do work in which they are not interested as to accept graft." When interest in work and efficiency in work are regarded as of more importance than the immediate returns for work, when it is as natural for boys and girls to demand enjoyment and complete living in work as it is to thrill at the sight ofthe Stars and Stripes, do-nothing ailments will be less frequent and less costly.
Work—that one enjoys—is an invaluable unpatented medicine. It can make the sick well and keep the well from getting sick. It is the chief reliance of mental hygiene. "I should have the grippe if I had time," said a business woman to me the other day; but she did not have time, hence she did not have the grippe.
If you're sick with something chronic,And you think you need a tonic,Do something.There is life and health in doing,There is pleasure in pursuing;Doing, then, is health accruing—Do something.And if you're seeking pleasure,Or enjoyment in full measure,Do something.Idleness, there's nothing in it;'Twill not pay you for a minute—Do something.
If you're sick with something chronic,And you think you need a tonic,Do something.There is life and health in doing,There is pleasure in pursuing;Doing, then, is health accruing—Do something.
And if you're seeking pleasure,Or enjoyment in full measure,Do something.Idleness, there's nothing in it;'Twill not pay you for a minute—Do something.
One of the red-letter days of my life was that on which I learned that I could not have inherited tuberculosis from two uncles who died of consumption. For years I had known that I was a marked victim. Silently I carried my tragedy, suspecting each cold and headache to be the telltale messenger that should let others into my secret. He was a veritable emancipator who informed me that heredity did not work from uncle to nephew; that not more than a predisposition to consumption could pass even from parent to child; that a predisposition to consumption would come to nothing without the germ of the disease and the environmental conditions which favor its development; and that if those so predisposed avoid gross infection, lead a healthy life, and breathe fresh air they are as safe as though no tuberculous lungs had ever existed in the world. Some years later I learned to understand the other side of the case; I realized how I had been in real danger of contracting consumption in the darkened, ill-ventilated sick room of the uncle who taught me my letters and gave me my ideal of God's purpose in sending uncles to small boys.
There are two distinct things which make each individual life: the living stuff, the physical basis of life, handed down from parent to child; and the environmental conditions which surround it and play upon it and rouse its reactions and its latent possibilities. It is like the seed and the cultivation. You cannot grow corn from wheat, but you can grow the best wheat, or you may let your crop fail through careless handling.
It is well that we should think seriously about the part played by heredity, for the living stuff of the future depends upon our sense of responsibility in this regard. The intelligent citizen would do well to read such a book as J. Arthur Thompson'sHeredity(1908), in which the latest conclusions of science are clearly and soundly set forth.
The main problem of to-day, however, is to use well the talents that we have. Here two things should always be kept in mind: First, the inherited elements which make up our minds and bodies are complex and diverse. Health and strength are inherited as well as disease and weakness; they have indeed a better chance of survival. In the most unpromising ancestry there are latent potentialities which may be made fruitful by effort. No limit whatever can be set to the possibilities of improvement in any individual.
In the second place, if science has shown anything more clearly than the importance of heredity, it is the importance of environment. This influence upon human lives is within our control, and it is a grave error to neglect what lies clearly within our power and to bemoan what does not. Science has wrought no benefits greater than those which result from drawing a clear line between heredity bugaboos and heredity truths. An overemphasis on the hereditary factor in development at the expense of the environmental factor, I call a heredity bugaboo; and it is a tendency which cannot be too strongly condemned. To fight against the sins and penalties of one's grandfather is a forlorn task that quickly discourages. To overcome diseases of environment, of shop and street, of house and school, seems, on the contrary, an easy task. Heredity bugaboos dishearten, enervate, encourage excesses and neglect. Heredity truths stimulate remedial and preventive measures.
We may well watch with interest the progress of eugenics, that new science which biologists and sociologists hope will some day remake the very living stuff of the humanrace. But meanwhile let us take up with hope and courage and enthusiasm the great hemisphere of human fate which lies within our grasp. Good food and fresh air, well-built cities, enlightened schools and well-ordered industries, stable and free and expert government,—given these things, we can transform the world with the means now at our disposal. We can reap, if we will, splendid possibilities now going to waste, and by intelligent biological and sociological engineering we can hand on to the next generation an environmental inheritance which will make their task far easier than ours.
"Physical deterioration" is a bugaboo that is discovered by some in heredity and by others in modern industrial evils. The British director general called attention a few years ago to the fact that from forty to sixty per cent of the men who were being examined for military service were physically unfit. A Commission on Physical Deterioration was appointed to investigate the cause, and to learn whether the low physical standard of the would-be Tommy Atkins was due to inherited defects. The results of this study were published in a large volume calledReport on Physical Deterioration, 1904, in which is set forth a positive programme for obtaining periodically facts as to the physique of the nation. In the course of the commission's exhaustive investigation there was found no evidence that any progressive deterioration was going on in any function of the body except the teeth. "There are happily no grounds for associating dental degeneracy with progressive physical deterioration." The increase in optical defects is attributed not to the deterioration of the eye, but to greater knowledge, more treatment, and better understanding of the connection between optical defects and headache.
Testing Environment--House Score
Definitions of Terms Used in House Score Card
The commission hoped "that the facts and opinions they have collected will have some effect in allaying the apprehensions of those who, as it appears, on insufficient grounds, have made up their minds that progressive deterioration is to be found among people generally." In regard to the facts which started the fear, the report says: (1) the evidence adduced in the director general's memorandum was inadequate to prove that physical deterioration had affected the classes referred to; (2) no sufficient material (statistical or other) is at present available to warrant any definite conclusions on the question of the physique of the people by comparison with data obtained in past times.
The Best Inheritance Is A Mother Who Knows How To Keep Her Baby WellTHE BEST INHERITANCE IS A MOTHER WHO KNOWS HOW TO KEEP HER BABY WELL
THE BEST INHERITANCE IS A MOTHER WHO KNOWS HOW TO KEEP HER BABY WELL
The topics dealt with in the report refer to only a partial list of conditions that need to be carefully studied before we can know what environment heredity we are preparing for those who follow us:
I. As to BabiesTraining of mothers, provident societies and maternity funds, feeding of infants, milk supply, milk depots, sterilization andrefrigeration of milk, effect of mother's employment upon infant mortality, still births, cookery, hygiene and domestic economy, public nurseries, crèches.II. As to ChildrenAnthropometric measurements, sickness and open spaces, medical examination of school children, teeth, eyes, and ears, games and exercises for school children, open spaces and gymnastic apparatus, physical exercise for growing girls and growing boys, clubs and cadet corps, feeding of elementary school children, partial exemption from school, special schools for "retarded" children, special magistrate for juvenile cases, juvenile smoking, organization of existing agencies for the welfare of lads and girls, education, school attendance in rural districts, defective children.III. As to Living and Working ConditionsRegister of sickness, medical certificates as to causes of death, overcrowding, building and open spaces, register of owners of buildings, unsanitary and overcrowded house property, rural housing, workshops, coal mines, etc., medical inspection of factories, employment of women in factories, labor colonies, overfatigue, food and cooking, cooking grates, adulteration, smoke pollution, alcohol, syphilis, insanity.IV. As to Health MachineryMedical officers of health, local, district, and national boards, health associations.
I. As to Babies
Training of mothers, provident societies and maternity funds, feeding of infants, milk supply, milk depots, sterilization andrefrigeration of milk, effect of mother's employment upon infant mortality, still births, cookery, hygiene and domestic economy, public nurseries, crèches.
II. As to Children
Anthropometric measurements, sickness and open spaces, medical examination of school children, teeth, eyes, and ears, games and exercises for school children, open spaces and gymnastic apparatus, physical exercise for growing girls and growing boys, clubs and cadet corps, feeding of elementary school children, partial exemption from school, special schools for "retarded" children, special magistrate for juvenile cases, juvenile smoking, organization of existing agencies for the welfare of lads and girls, education, school attendance in rural districts, defective children.
III. As to Living and Working Conditions
Register of sickness, medical certificates as to causes of death, overcrowding, building and open spaces, register of owners of buildings, unsanitary and overcrowded house property, rural housing, workshops, coal mines, etc., medical inspection of factories, employment of women in factories, labor colonies, overfatigue, food and cooking, cooking grates, adulteration, smoke pollution, alcohol, syphilis, insanity.
IV. As to Health Machinery
Medical officers of health, local, district, and national boards, health associations.
Scientists of the next generation will continue to differ as to heredity truths and heredity bugaboos unless records are kept now, showing the physical condition of school children and of applicants for work certificates and for civil service and army positions. The British investigators declared that "anthropometric records are the only accredited tests available, and, if collected on a sufficient scale, they would constitute the supreme criterion of physical deterioration, or the reverse.... The school population andthe classes coming under the administration of the Factory Acts offer ready material for the immediate application of such tests." In addition to the physical tests proposed in other chapters, there is great educational opportunity in the records of private and public hospitals. Every nation, every state, and every city should enlist all its educational and scientific forces to ascertain in what respects social efficiency is endangered by physical deficiencies that can be avoided only by restricting parenthood, and the environmental deficiencies that can be avoided by efficient health machinery.
The greatest of all heredity truths are these: (1) the deficiencies of infants are infinitesimal compared with the deficiencies of the world with which we surround them; (2) each of us can have a part in begetting for posterity an environment of health and of opportunity.
Wherever the Stars and Stripes fly over school buildings it is made compulsory to teach the evils of alcoholism. For nearly a generation the great majority of school children of the United States have been taught that alcohol, in however small quantities, is a poison and a menace to personal and national health and prosperity. Yet during this very period the per capita consumption of every kind of alcoholic beverage has increased. Whereas 16.49 gallons of spirituous liquors were consumed per capita of population in 1896, 22.27 gallons were used in 1906. Obviously the results of methods hitherto in vogue for combating alcoholism are disappointing.
Why this paradoxical relation of precept to practice? Why is this, the most hygiene-instructed country in the world, the Elysium of the patent-medicine and cocaine traffic? If we have only the expected divergence of achievement from ideal, then there is nothing for us to do but to congratulate ourselves and posterity upon the part played by compulsory legislation in committing all states and territories to hygiene instruction in all public schools. If, on the other hand, our disappointment is due to ineffective method, then the next step is to change our method.
The chief purpose of school hygiene has hitherto been not to promote personal and community health, but to lessen the use of alcohol and tobacco. Arguments were required against whisky, beer, cigars, and cigarettes. As the strongest arguments would probably make the most lasting impression upon the school child and the best profits forauthor and bookseller, writers vied with one another in the rhetoric and hyperbole of platform agitation. What effect would it have upon you if you were exhorted frequently during the next eight years to avoid tobacco because a mother once killed a child by washing its head in tobacco water? What is the effect on the mind of a boy or a girl who sees that the family doctor, the minister, the teacher, the judge, the governor, the President, and the philanthropist use tobacco and alcoholic beverages, when taught that "boys who use tobacco and alcoholic beverages will find closed in their faces the doors to strength, good health, skill in athletics, good scholarship, long life, best companions, many business positions, highest success"? It is probably true that "a boy once drank some whisky from a flask and died within a few hours." But that story is about as typical of boys and of whisky as that a boy once drank whisky from a flask and did not die for ninety years afterwards, or that George Washington drank whisky and became the Father of his Country.
How special pleading has dominated the teaching of school hygiene is illustrated by a recent book which, for the most part, successfully breaks away from the narrow point of view and the crude methods hitherto prevailing. It presents the following facts concerning New York City:
Saloons10,821Arrests133,749Expense of police department$10,199,206Police courts, jails, workhouses, reformatories1,310,411Hospitals, asylums, and other charities4,754,380
It is fair to the author to state that she does not declare in so many words that the shutting up of the saloons would obviate all the arrests and all the hospital, jail, and charity bills. Instead ofwipe outshe saysshrivel. No truth would have been lost by avoiding all misrepresentation.
The author probably felt as I did when I took my total abstainer's protest to a celebrated scientist who had exposed certain misstatements regarding the effect of small quantities of alcohol: "Is not the untruth of these exaggerated statements less dangerous than the untruth of dispassionate, scientific statement? So long as the child mind takes in only an impression, is it not better to write this impression indelibly?" He sadly but indulgently replied, "And in what other studies would you substitute exaggeration for truth?"
The reaction has already begun against exaggeration in hygiene text-books, against drawing lessons from accidental or exceptional cases of excessive use of alcohol, against classing moderate drinking and smoking with drunkenness as sins of equal magnitude, and against overlooking grave social and industrial evils that threaten children far earlier and more frequently than do tobacco and alcohol. Instead of adding an ell to the truth, text-book writers are now adding only an inch or two at a time. No longer do we favor highly colored charts that picture in purple, green, and black the effect of stimulants and narcotics upon the heart and brain, the stomach, the liver, the knee, and the eardrum,assuming that all resultant evils are concentrated in one organ. Menacing habits, such as overeating and indulgence in self-pity, are beginning to receive attention. It is also true that physiology and anatomy are progressively made more interesting. Publishers are looking for the utmost originality compatible with the purpose of the present laws and with the only effective public sentiment that has hitherto been interested in the interpretation of those laws.
A score of improvements in the method of carrying out a small ideal will not take the place of enlarging that ideal. If existing laws stand in the way of broadening the purpose of school hygiene, let the laws be changed. If text-book publishers stand in the way, let us induce or compel them to get out of the way. If we fear rumsellers, their money,and the insidious political methods that they might employ to bring in undertruth if overtruth is once sacrificed, let us go to our communities and locate the rumseller's guns, draw their fire, tell the truth about their opposition, and educate the public to overcome it. If, on the other hand, misguided teetotalism stands in the way, then, as one teetotaler, I suggest that we prove, as we can, in our respective communities that there is a better way of inculcating habits of temperance and self-restraint than by telling untruths, overtruths, or half truths about alcohol and tobacco. Let us prove, as we can, that a subject vital to every individual, to every industry, and to every government is now prevented from fulfilling its mission not by its enemies but by its friends. We can learn the character of hygiene instruction in our schools and the interest taken in it by teachers, principals, and superintendents. We can learn how teachers practice hygiene at school, and how the children of our communities are affected by the hygiene instruction now given. Finally, we can compel a public discussion of the facts, and action in accordance with facts. Without questioning anybody's avowed motive, we can learn how big that motive is and how adequate or inadequate is the method of executing it.
Alcohol and tobacco really occupy but a very small share of the interest and attention of even those men and women by whom they are habitually used. Hygiene, on the other hand, is of constant, uninterrupted concern. Why, therefore, should it be planned to have alcohol and tobacco displace the broader subject of personal and public hygiene in the attention and interest of children throughout the school life? Beyond the text-book and schoolroom a thousand influences are at work to teach the social evils, the waste of energy, and the unhappiness that always accompany the excessive use—and frequently result from a moderate use—of stimulants and narcotics. Of the many reasons for not drinking and smoking, physiology gives those that leastinterest and impress the child. The secondary effects, rather than the immediate effects, are those that determine a child's action. Most of the direct physiological effects are, in the majority of instances, less serious in themselves than the effects of overeating, of combining milk with acids, of eating irregularly, of neglecting constipation. Were it not for the social and industrial consequences of drunkenness and nicotinism, it is doubtful if the most lurid picture of fatty degeneration, alcoholic consumption, hardened liver, inactive stomach lining, would outweigh the pleasing—and deceiving—sensations of alcoholic beverages and cigarettes.
The strong appeal to the child or man is the effect these habits have upon his mother, his employer, his wife, his children. The vast majority of us will avoid or stop using anything that makes us offensive to those with whom we are most intimately associated, and to those upon whom our professional and industrial promotion depends. Children will profit from drill in and out of school in the science of avoiding offense and of giving happiness, but unless the categories—acts that give offenseandacts that give happiness—are wide enough to include the main acts committed in the normal relations of son, companion, employer, husband, father, and citizen, those who set out to avoid alcohol and tobacco find themselves ill equipped to carry the obligations of a temperate, law-abiding citizen.
Things do not happen as described in the early text-book. Other things not mentioned hinder progress and happiness. The child at work resents the mis-education received at school and suspects that he has been following false gods. The enemies that cause him trouble come from unexpected sources. He finds it infinitely easier to eschew alcohol and tobacco than to avoid living conditions that insidiously undermine his aversion to stimulants and narcotics. The reasons for avoiding stimulants in the interest of others are morenumerous and more cogent than the reasons for avoiding stimulants and narcotics for one's own sake. The altruistic reasons for shunning stimulants and narcotics cannot be implanted in the child unless he sees the evil of excessper sein anything and everything, and unless he becomes thoroughly grounded in the life relations and health relations to which he must adapt himself.
Unclean streets, unclean milk, congested tenements, can do more harm than alcohol and tobacco, because they breed a physique that craves stimulants and drugs. Adenoids and defective vision will injure a larger proportion of the afflicted than will alcohol and tobacco, because they earlier and more certainly substitute discouragement for hope, handicap for equal chance. Failure to enforce health laws is a more serious menace to health and morals than drunkenness or tobacco cancer.
If it is true that we must attack the problem of alcohol from the standpoint of its social and industrial effects, we are forced at once to consider the machinery by which cities and governments control the manufacture and sale of alcohol. It is not an exaggeration to say that courses in regulating the traffic in alcohol are more necessary than courses in the effects of alcohol upon digestion and respiration.
If Sunday closing of saloons, local option, high license, and prohibition have failed, there is no evidence that the failure is due to the principles underlying any one of these methods. Until more earnest effort is made to study the effects of these methods, the results of their enforcement and the causes of their nonenforcement, no one is justified in declaring that either policy is successful or unsuccessful. It is very easy to select from the meager facts now available convincing proofs both that prohibition does not prohibit and that high license leads to increased drunkenness. The consequence is that the movements to control, restrict, or prohibit the use of alcohol are emotional, not rational.
It is impossible to keep emotion, sensation, sentiment, at white heat. Most extremists worship legislation and do not try to keep interest alive by telling every week or every month new facts about the week or the month before. No new fuel is added to the anti-saloon fire, which gradually cools and dies down. Not so, however, with those who make money by the sale of intoxicants. The greater the opposition, the more brains, the more effort, the more money they put into overcoming or circumventing that opposition. Fuel is piled on and the bonfire is fed freely. Every day the anti-restriction bonfire becomes larger and larger, and the anti-saloon bonfire becomes smaller and smaller. By carefully selecting their facts, by counting the number of arrests for drunkenness and the number of saloons open on Sunday, by reiteration of their story the pro-saloonists gradually win recruits from the opposition, and, when the next election comes, their friends outnumber their enemies and the "dry" policy of a city, county, or state is reversed.
The failures attributed to prohibitive or restrictive measures are probably no more numerous than the failures of government in other respects. The present ambassador from England, James Bryce, writing hisAmerican Commonwealth, declared that municipal government was America's "most conspicuous failure." The mayor of Toledo, writing in 1907, says, "There has been a pessimism, almost enthusiastic, about the city." These failures are due not to any lack of desire for good government, not to any fundamental evils of cities, but to the fact that municipal reform, like the crusade against alcohol, has been based upon emotionalism, not upon definite proof. Reformers have been unable to lead in the right direction, because they have looked at their lantern instead of their road. Not having cumulative information as to government acts, they have been unable to keep their fires burning. To illustrate: in November, 1907, the governor of New York state, themayor of New York City, and reformers of national reputation eulogized the tenement-house department; yet this department, whose founding was regarded as a national benefaction, was the only department of the city government that did not receive an increase for 1908. It is in the position of temperance legislation, the facts of whose enforcement or nonenforcement are not promptly and continuously made public.
Fear of the negro victim of alcoholism, social evils of intemperance, whether among white or black, industrial uncertainty and waste due to alcoholism, are the three chief motives that have swept alcohol traffic out of the greater part of the South. Knowledge of physiological evils has had little influence, except as it may have rendered more acceptable the claim that alcoholism is a disease against which there is no insurance except abolition of alcohol as a beverage. Religious revivals, street parades by day and by night, illustrated banners, personal intercession, lines of women and children at the polls, made it necessary for voters to make known their intention, and made it extremely difficult for respectable men, engaged in respectable business, to vote for saloons. Some states have gone so far as to prohibit the manufacture of alcoholic stimulants, even though not offered for sale within state limits. In Georgia wine cannot be used at the communion service, nor can druggists sell any form of liquor except pure alcohol. In Louisiana it is illegal for representatives of "wet districts" to solicit orders for liquor in any of the "dry districts." In Texas the sale of liquor in dining cars is forbidden, and the traveler may not even drink from his own flask. Congress is being urged by senators and congressmen, as well as by anti-saloon advocates, to pass laws prohibiting common carriers from delivering alcoholics to any "dry" community. The more optimistic anti-saloon workers believe it is but a matter of a short time when Congress will pass laws prohibitingthe manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages within any limits protected by the United States Constitution.
Southern states have been warned that they could not afford the depreciation of real estate values, of rents, and of business that would surely follow the "confiscation of capital" and "interference with personal liberty." This warning has been met by plausible arguments that the buyers of legitimate and nonpoisonous commodities could pay better rents, better profits on business and on real estate, if freed from the uneven fight against temptation to drink. The argument that schools and streets and health must suffer if the license money was withdrawn, has been met by the plausible argument that the ultimate taxpayer—the family that wants clothing, food, and shelter—will save enough money to be able to spend still larger sums than heretofore upon education, health, and public safety.
For the first time dealers in alcohol recognize the possibility of a great national movement and of national prohibition. Both the defects in methods hitherto used to oppose saloon legislation and the reasons for meeting the present situation by new methods are presented in the May issue (1907) of theTransactions of the American Brewing Institute. Under the title, "Social Order and the Saloon—the Measure of the Brewer's Responsibility," Mr. Hugh F. Fox, known throughout the Union as a defender of child rights, advocate of probation and children's courts, promoter of health and education, outlined a plan for research that is indispensable to the proper settling of this great question. Whether brewer or anti-saloon leaguist, total abstainer or moderate drinker, employer or trade unionist, it is necessary to the intelligent control of alcohol that each of us approach this momentous question of control or abolition of the saloon in the spirit expressed in this paper, whose thoroughness and whose social point of view would do credit to a church conference. The address isquoted and its questions copied because both show how much depends upon knowing whether laws are enforced and how much greater is the difficulty of coping with a conciliatory antagonist who professes willingness to submit to tests of evidence.