October 21, 1917
The Playgrounds and Recreation Association of America has undertaken a capital work in pushing the War Camp Community Committee, of which Mr. John N. Willys, of Toledo, is chairman. The War Camp Committee work for Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Colorado has made Mr. I. R. Kirkwood chairman, and has begun an active drive to get the three-quarter of a million dollars allotted to this district out of the total of four million to be raised in the country.
The movement should receive the heartiest backing. It represents much more even than the very important work of providing amusements for the hundreds of thousands of enlisted men in the various camps, for it also has to deal with the moral and sanitary surroundings, not only in camps, but in the neighboring towns and cities. In former wars the number of men incapacitated by diseases contracted in the camps often surpassed the number incapacitated by the sickness due to the hardships and exposure at the front. This was because of lax supervision of the neighborhood moral and sanitary conditions, and also from failure to instruct the soldiers that it is a shameful and unsoldierly thing to expose themselves to disease due to indulgence in vice.
The committee is working not only in the interests of national morality and decency. It is also working in the interest of military efficiency, for it will save scores of thousands of soldiers from being shamefully incapacitated before reaching the front, and the gain to the Nation from the economical as well as the moral standpoint, after the war, will be very great.
The work of the committee will be carried on outside the camps in the adjacent communities acting in coöperation with churches, clubs, and organizations of public-spirited men and women. It will be wholly different from the work inside the camps, which is done by the Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.H.A., and similar bodies. In many places the local authorities already have done much work along the lines sketched by the national committee, and wherever this is the case, the national committee will surely aid the local bodies.
All good and patriotic men and women should heartily back this work to keep Uncle Sam’s soldiers clean, decent, and self-respecting; to make them better citizens and more formidable fighting men.
THE PASSING OF THE CRIPPLE
October 23, 1917
If men are alert, resolute, and energetic, they can usually secure some compensation from any calamity. This dreadful war, attended by the killing and crippling of men on a scale hitherto unknown, has brought as a compensation a determined move to do away with the cripple; that is, to cease the mere effort to keep a crippled man alive and, instead, to endeavor by reconstructive surgery to restore him to himself and to the community as an economic asset.
Surgeon-General Gorgas and his associates have worked out, and are ready practically to test, an organized system under which any seemingly crippled man is to be kept under the guidance of the medical branch of the army until either the usefulness of the damaged part has been restored or else until he has been trained in other ways so as to enable him measurably to overcome the handicap. In almost every case something will be done to make the cripple less of a burden to himself and others, and in most cases, the army medical service confidently believes, the cripple will once more become a useful and therefore a happy citizen. In all our special hospitals that are now being planned, the curative workshop is part of the plant. The effort is to be not only for the physical development and physical reëducation of the wounded part, but also for any intellectual training necessary to produce new forms of effective ability which will offset any loss in physical ability. The aim is not merely to save the life of, and then turn loose, a crippled pensioner who can be little but a burden on the community; it is to take care of the wounded man until the very best of which he is capable has been developed, so that when once more in the outside world he will be a real asset to the Nation. This is a fine thing for the Nation, and is of incalculable consequence from the standpoint of the self-respect and happiness of the man.