The children, pale and sick, three of them short-sighted, the mother and little child with inflamed eyes, were in a horrible condition.
I immediately advised the office and succeeded in getting the family moved to the Bronx, near a park, and on the fifth floor. So little were the children accustomed to light that the first few days they felt dizzy. Their clothes and bedding was disinfected. Hurriedly the family was put on the pension list, rent, coal and three dollars per week. It was not much, it was not enough, but it was the best I could obtain for the unfortunate people.
A few weeks later the oldest girl too was taken to the hospital and the mother was treated in one of the clinics in the neighbourhood. She obtained two quarts of milk a day free.
They had not been long in the country—four or five years; had previously lived in a little village in Northern Russia. The man was a dealer in grains there, was always in the open air. The sudden change to a big city, a sweatshop, was too much for him, too much for all of them. Several months later, while I was in the neighbourhood, I went to visit the family. At the door of the fifth floor, I was told they had moved away long ago. Where? The people did not know, nor did the janitor, nor did the neighbours. When I returned to the office I looked up the records and found their new address, 171st Street. I took a note of it, and as my work brought me there a few days later, I called in. I was astonished to find the people living in a basement—the rooms were next to the engine room. It was a big apartment house and the heat in the rooms was suffocating.
"Woman," I cried, "what have you done? Why did you move from the other place?"
"The investigator told me to," was her answer.
"But you are killing yourself, ruining the broken health of your children."
She shrugged her shoulders, the children coughed, and even the baby had eyeglasses on. It was the district of Mrs. B.—the investigator who lectured so well on tuberculosis. I waited for her in the office and asked her why she had moved the family from the top floor to the basement.
"I can't run up so many stairs every day," she answered angrily. "I have a big district and they all live on top floors. Basements are cheaper and it is easier for me," she went on.
"But, Mrs. B., the whole family is touched by the plague. You know better than they do how necessary it is for them to live in light and airy rooms. You lecture on the subject."