These defects are often acquired before school age, or as a result of home conditions during school age. Note that they are chiefly preventable by good hygiene in the home, practiced by intelligent mothers and fathers.
Forms of rheumatism, heart disease, infectious diseases (such as whooping cough, measles, mumps, scarlet fever), respiratory diseases (as pneumonia, croup, tuberculosis), all are prevalent and preventable diseases of childhood, reaping every year a great harvest, and leaving a trail of permanent defects.
Two means of prevention are necessary and at hand:
(1) Wholesome daily hygiene (the elements of such hygiene have been suggested in the foregoing pages). (2) Early detection of defects or weakness, and their remedy in the incipient stage. This is possible by an examination every six months during childhood and youth, by (a) a competent physician, trained for preventive examinations, (b) osteopath, (c) dentist, (d) oculist. With these two precautions on the part of the home, the present enormous deathroll of one hundred and fifty thousand little children each year from preventable causes, and the preventable defective conditions of fourteen million of the twenty million school children, could be practically eliminated, and as reckoned by Professor Irving Fisher, the span of life for each child could be increased fifteen years.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See Preface, page [xiii].
[16] Adapted and amplified from the Ninth Year Book of the National Society for the Study of Education, by permission of the author, Doctor Thomas D. Wood.
CHAPTER IX
THE FEEDING OF CHILDREN[17]
“We are what we eat.”
“We should eat to live and not live to eat.”