“That boy? He’s two grades behind where he should be in school. It takes him some time to get the drift of anything that’s said to him. I should judge his brain is weak. Anyway, I don’t see where he keeps it, for the upper part of his face is all wrong, the roof of the mouth is so pushed up. The poor little chap’s brain-pan must be contracted.”
“Perfectly correct, and all the result of adenoids again. The boy is the worst example I’ve been able to find. But all three of the children are terribly handicapped; one by a painful homeliness, one by a ruined digestion, and the boy by a mental deficiency—and all simply and solely because they were neglected by ignorant parents and still more ignorant school authorities.”
“Would you have the public schools deal with such details?” asked Mr. Clyde.
“Certainly. Have you ever heard what Goler, the Health Officer of Rochester, asked that city? ‘Oughtn’t we to close the schools and repair the children?’ he asked, and he kept on asking, until now Rochester has a regular system of looking after the noses, mouths, and eyes of its young. They want their children, in that city, to start the battle of life in fighting trim.”
“But you don’t see many misshapen children about,” objected Mrs. Sharpless.
“Then it’s because you don’t look. Call to your mind Hogarth’s caricatures. Do you remember that in his crowds there are always clubfooted, or humpbacked, or deformed people? In those days such deformities were very common because medical science didn’t know how to correct them in the young. To-day facial deformities, to the scientific eye, are quite as common, though not as obvious. We’re just learning how to correct them, and to know that the hatchet-face is a far more serious clog on a human being’s career than is the clubfoot.”
“If Betty had a clubfoot, of course—” began Mrs. Clyde.
“Of course, you’d have it repaired at whatever cost of suffering. You’d submit her to a long and serious operation; and probably to the constant pain of a rigid iron frame upon her leg for months, perhaps years. To obviate the deformity you’d consider that not too high a price to pay, and rightly. Well, here is the case of a more far-reaching malformation, curable by a minor operation, without danger, mercifully quick, with only the briefest after-effects of pain, and you draw back from it. Why?”
“The thought of the knife on that little face. Is—is that all there is to be done?”
“No, there are the teeth. They should be looked to.”