William H. Allen

“ City children, on the other hand, would reap worlds of physical benefit and untold inspiration from periods of recreation and study in the country, with its quiet, its greens and bronzes and yellows, its birds and animals, its sky that sits like a dome on the earth, its hopefulness. Winter sleigh rides and coasting would give new vigor and ambition. Why spend so much on teaching physiology, geography, and nature study, if in the end we fail to send the child where alone nature and hygiene tell their story? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a great pity that we Americans have taken so long to learn that laws do not enforce themselves, that even good motives and good intentions in the best of officials do not insure good deeds. Thousands of lives are being lost every year, millions of days taken from industry and wasted by unnecessary sickness, millions of dollars spent on curing disease, the working life of the nation shortened, the hours of enjoyment curtailed, because we have not seen the great gap between health laws and health-law enforcement. ”

“ Why tax ourselves to teach history and sociology and commercial geography out of books when excursions to the city and country will paint pictures on the mind that can never be erased? What more attractive or more reasonable than appetizing, warm meals, or cool salads and drinks for [163] the boys and girls who carry their little dinner pails and baskets down the long road where everything runs together in summer and everything freezes in winter? One needs little imagination to see the "smile that won't come off," health, punctuality, and school interest resulting from the school meal. ”

“ So great is the value—mentally, morally, and physically—of out-of-door play that it has even been suggested that the substitution of such play for school for all children up to the age of ten would insure better minds and sounder physiques at fifteen. It is generally admitted that the child who enters school at eight rather than at six will be the gainer at twelve. What a travesty upon education to insist upon schooling for children because they are apt to be run over on the street, or to be neglected at home, to shoot craps, or belong to a gang and develop bad morals. ”

“ The physician who refuses to tell the board of health when smallpox or typhoid fever first breaks out takes human life just as truly as if he tore up the tracks in front of an express train. This is another way of saying that parents and teachers must fit themselves to know whether the family physician and their community's physicians are efficient practitioners and teachers. Every one can learn enough about the preventable causes of sickness and depleted vitality to insist upon the ounce of education and prevention that is better than a pound of cure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Schools and chairs in preventive hygiene would soon give to the medical profession a point of view that would welcome every new truth, such as the alliance of religion and medicine, and estimate its full worth promptly. Truth seeking would be not only encouraged but made a condition of professional standing.
Just what attitude any particular physician takes can be learned by the teacher or parents whose children he treats. If he pooh-poohs or resents board of health regulations as to isolation of scarlet-fever patients, he is a dangerous man, no matter how noble his personal character. ”

“ Pro-slum motives are shared by too few and are expressed too irregularly to help all of those who suffer from crowded tenements, impure milk, unclean streets, inadequate schooling. So long as those who suffer have no other protection than the self-interest or the benevolence of those better situated, disease and hardship inevitably persist. Health administration is incomplete until its blessings are given to men, women, and children as rights that can be enforced through courts, as can the right to free speech, the freedom of the press, and trial by jury. ”

“ If a school physician is slovenly in his work, if he spends fifteen minutes when he is paid for an hour, should the efficient school-teacher conceal the fact from her superiors because he is a physician? ”

“ Laws define rights. Men enforce them. For definitions we go to books. For record of enforcement we go to acts and to conditions. [3] What health rights a community pretends to enforce will, as a rule, be found in its health code. What health rights are actually enforced can be learned only by studying both the people who are to be protected and the conditions in which these people live. A street, a cellar, a milk shop, a sick baby, or an adult consumptive tells more honestly the story of health rights enforced and health rights unenforced than either sanitary code or sanitary squad. ”

“ To take palliative measures to public schools not only leaves undone remedial work necessary for the health of public school children but neglects entirely the still large numbers who go to parochial, private pay, and private free schools; no one has had the temerity to suggest that the public shall force upon nonpublic schools a system of free operations, free eyeglasses, free meals.
Civilization has painstakingly developed a large number of agencies for the education and protection of mankind. Of these agencies the school is but one. ”

“ Parents, school directors, county and state superintendents, university presidents, social workers, owe it not only to themselves, but to the American school-teacher, either to repeal the laws that enjoin instruction in hygiene or else so to adjust the curriculum that teachers can comply with those laws. The present situation that discredits both law and hygiene is most demoralizing to teacher, pupil, and community. Many of us might admire the man teacher who frankly says he never explains the evils of cigarettes because he himself is an inveterate smoker of cigarettes. ”

“ One day a girl in the workroom had an epileptic fit and it frightened everybody and upset the work so that the foreman always asks, 'Do you have fits? Because if you do, you can't work here.'" He makes no attempt to determine the physical fitness and endurance of the children employed, because when the strength of one is spent there is always another to step into her place.
Because the apprentice's future is of no value to the manufacturer, the state must restrict the manufacturer's freedom to spend like water society's capital,—the health of the coming generation. ”

“ It is the evils of patent medicines that do harm, not their name and not their patents. The medical profession has in vain protested against proprietary medicines. Ethical barriers cannot be erected by resolution. Calling things unethical does not make them unethical. The mere patenting of medicines for profit does not make the medicine injurious any more than the mere mixing of unpatented drugs makes a physician safe. Physicians who would not themselves patent a drug will use certain patented drugs whose ingredients are known to be safe and uniform. ”

“ The brutalizing of industry was due chiefly to a general ignorance of health laws,—an ignorance that registers itself clearly and promptly in factory and mine. It is not that a man is expected to do too much, but that too little is expected of the human body. The present recognition of the body's right to vitality is not because the employer's heart is growing warmer, or because competition is less vicious, but because the precepts of hygiene are found to be practical. ”

“ Until schools insist upon a better ventilation than the worst factories, how can we expect to find children of working age sensitive to impure air? Where work benches are more comfortable than school desks, where drinking water is cleaner and towels more sanitary, however unsanitary they may be, than those found in the schoolhouse, the worker does not realize that they menace his right to earn a living wage as much as does a temporary shut-down. ”

“ Could there be a grosser mis-management of society's business than to permit trade to waste children on whose education society spends so many millions yearly? The most effective and most timely remedy is physical examination as a condition of the work certificate. A simple, easily applied, inexpensive measure that imposes only a legitimate restriction upon individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary in order to get to the bottom of the child labor problem. ”

“ Of what possible use is it to say that state money may be withheld from any school board which fails to enforce the law regarding instruction in hygiene, if state officials never enforce the penalty? So long as the penalty is not enforced for flagrant violation, what difference does it make whether the reason is indifference, ignorance, or desire to thwart the law? Fortunately, it is easy for each one of us to learn how often and in what way the children in our community are being taught hygiene, and how the schools of our state teach and practice the laws of health. ”

“ Children have not forgotten how to play, but adults have forgotten to leave space in cities, and time out of school, home work, and factory work in which children may play. Again, the child—whether a city child or a country child—rarely needs to be taught how to play. Teaching him games will not produce vitality. Games are the spontaneous product of a healthy body, active mind, and a joy in living. Give the children parks and piers, roof gardens and playgrounds in which they may play, and leave the rest to them. Give them time away from school and housework, and leave the rest to them. ”

“ Without protest, and without notice until too late, teachers often neglect their own health at home and at school,—recklessly overwork, undersleep, and undernourish; ruin their eyes, their digestion, and their nerves. School-teachers are frequently "sweated" as mercilessly as factory operatives. The time has come to admit that a school environment which destroys the health of the teacher is as unnecessary and reprehensible as an army camp that spreads typhoid among a nation's defenders. ”

“ Children, like adults, can be interested in other people, in rules of conduct, in social conditions, in living and working relations more easily than in their own bodies. The normal, healthy child thinks very little of himself apart from the other boys and girls, the games, the studies, the animals, the nature wonders, the hardships that come to him from the outside. So true is this that one of the best means of mitigating or curing many ailments is to divert the child's attention from himself to things outside of himself that he can look at, hear, enjoy. ”

“ Of utmost consequence is it that the body's germ consumer—its pretorian guard—be always armed with vitality ready to vanquish every intruding hostile germ. If we are false to our guard, it will turn traitor and join invaders in attacking us. But here, as in dealing with evils that originate with human beings, an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. The most effectual way to eliminate germ diseases is to remove the cause—the food supply of disease germs. The fact that many germs are plants, not animals, does not weaken the analogy, for weeds do not get a chance in well-tilled soil. ”

“ On the other hand, if the saloon is destined to be abolished as a public nuisance and a private wrong, as a menace to industry and social order, is it not a frightful, unforgivable waste of energy to permit prohibition laws to fail, and thus to discredit the principle of prohibition? Philanthropists have provided millions for scientific research, for medical research, for the study of tuberculosis, and for the study of living conditions. ”

“ What the employee can do for himself as a citizen, having equal health rights with employers, he has never been taught to see. Factory legislation is state direction of industries so far as relates to the safety, health, and moral condition of the people,—and which embraces to-day, more than in any other epoch, the opinion of the workers themselves. No government, however strong, can hope successfully to introduce social legislation largely affecting personal interests until public opinion has been educated to the belief that the remedies proposed are really necessary. ”

“ Woman's vanity sells many a remedy advertised to counteract the "vandal hand of disease, which robs her of her beauty, yellows and muddies her complexion, lines her face, pales cheek and lip, dulls the brilliancy of her eye, which it disfigures with dark circles, aging her before her time." ”

“ Just as there should be a central bureau to count and correct the open mouths and closed minds that clog the little old red schoolhouse of the country, so a central bureau should discover in the city teacher as well as in the country teacher the ailments more serious than tuberculosis that pass from teacher to pupil; slovenliness, ugly temper, frowning, crossness, lack of ambition, cynicism,—these should be blackballed as well as consumption, contagious morphine habit, and contagious skin disease. Crooked thinking by teacher leads to crooked thinking by pupil. ”

“ There are exceptions, it is true, where both industrial promotion and industrial efficiency are won by people who violate laws of health,—but at what cost to their efficiency? Your efficiency should be measured not by some other person's advancement, but by what you yourself ought to accomplish; while the effect of abusing your physical strength is shown not only in the shortening of your industrial life and in the diminishing returns from your labor, but by the decrease of national and trade efficiency. ”

“ Because the problems of health have to do principally with environment,—home, street, school, business,—it is worth while trying to relate hygiene instruction to industry and government, to preach health from the standpoint of industrial and national efficiency rather than of individual well-being. Since healthful living requires the coöperation of all persons in a household, in a group, or in a community, we must find some working programme that will make it easy for all the members of the group to observe health standards. ”