PUBLIC HEALTH
Contrary perhaps to general opinion, the rural sections of the country are not conspicuously free from a public health problem. All the squalor, bad housing and contagion is not in the crowded city tenements. Rural citizens have perhaps much more to learn about pure milk and water, for instance, than their city brethren. But the public health movement has struck the country districts. It seems to have come principally by way of the nation wide attack on tuberculosis. During the past six or seven years there has been a remarkable campaign for institutions for the care of persons afflicted with this malady. It is something entirely distinct from the idea of caring for the pauper sick, for it has been found difficult to persuade many people in need of proper treatment to go to an institution to which a long-standing stigma is attached. New York now has such special institutions in about half of its counties. In the South, North Carolina has made more important progress than any other state. Ninety of its hundred counties have part-time county physicians, while the other ten have county health officers devoting their entire time and energies to the preservation of public health and the prevention of disease. The standard for the selection of these officers is very high.
Wisconsin has enacted a statute authorizing the board of supervisors of any county to employ a graduate trained nurse whose duties are:
“To act as a consulting expert on hygiene for all schools not already having medical inspection either by physician or visiting nurse, to assist the superintendents of the poor in their care of the poor in the county who are in need of the services; to give instruction to tuberculosis patients and others relative to hygiene measures to be observed in preventing the spread of tuberculosis; to aid in making a report of existing cases of tuberculosis; to act as visiting nurse throughout the county and to perform such other duties as a nurse and hygienic expert as may be assigned to her by the county board.”
That the spirit of the new public health movement is taking hold to some extent in Minnesota is the testimony of a local authority[27]:
“Koochiching County has the first and only county health organization in the state. The county commissioners and the county school board there see the economy of hiring a medical man to preserve the health of the community and to keep the children in school the maximum number of days each term.
“Furthermore, they have chosen a health officer with a proper point of view; one who believes that a health department should be an educational agency more than a police bureau; one who reserves the ‘police club’ for exceptional emergencies, but who is ever ready to instruct and convert. In Koochiching County the authorities are laying the foundation for a type of citizenship that is not only going to grow up healthy, but will be so well informed that it will observe sanitary laws and insist upon proper health safeguards. A county health organization similar to the one in Koochiching County, or a better one if it can be afforded, is needed in every Minnesota county, southern as well as northern, but particularly in the pioneer district.”
The public health movement in counties is by no means limited to the cited states.