“As president of the Public Health League. The Superintendent of Schools came to me with a complaint against Dr. Merritt, the Health Officer, who, he claimed, was usurping authority in his scheme for a special inspection system to examine all schoolchildren at regular intervals.”
“Ought to have been established long ago,” declared Dr. Strong.
“The Superintendent thinks otherwise. He claims that it would interfere with school routine. It’s the duty of the health officials, he says, to control epidemics from without, to keep sickness out of the schools, not to hunt around among the children, scaring them to death about diseases that probably aren’t there.”
Dr. Strong muttered something which Grandma Sharpless pretended not to hear. “And you’ve agreed to support him in that attitude?” he queried.
“Well, I’m afraid I’ve half committed myself.”
“Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn’t that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There’s just one way to do that: get every child into the best possible condition of repair—eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and maintain them in that state. Then disease will have a hard time breaking down the natural resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a child are like flaws in a ship’s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the defenses. And remember, the child is always battling against one besieging germ or another.”
“Why can’t medical science wipe out the germs?” demanded Mrs. Sharpless. “It’s always claiming to do such wonders.”
“In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier by inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the other important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual; that is, make as nearly impregnable as possible the natural fortifications of the body to resist and repel the invasion. That is what school medical inspection aims at.”
“You wouldn’t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever, would you?” said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously.
“Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,—though not much more serious than those of measles,—the three are almost equal so far as the death-rate is concerned.”