A few years of school dental clinics have made “toothbrush drills” a fairly familiar idea in many cities. It took the Toronto public nurses, or rather their supervisor, Lina L. Rogers, to originate another drill quite as unique and important.
Since last October the school children of Toronto, in squads of twenty have practised daily “nose-blowing drills” and the effect on the freshness of the atmosphere of the schoolrooms has been so noticeable that the teachers have become assiduous in seeing to it that no child comes to school unprovided with a pocket handkerchief. They often, indeed, themselves order the drills without waiting for the coming of the nurse. The effect of the drill is perceptible already on individual children, in cases of catarrh, and the doctors predict that it will have an appreciable effect in time in lessening adenoids and other throat and nose affections.
It was Miss Rogers, who has recently become Mrs. W. E. Struthers, who, when a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1902 was chosen to demonstrate at the expense of the settlement in four local schools the need of municipal school nurses. This she did with such success that within a month the Department of Health took over the financial responsibility and extended the work, making her supervisor.
With a subsequent seven years’ experience in this capacity she went to Toronto in 1909, where she has done pioneer health work in the schools. These are now fully equipped with school nurses and with dental care, one of the four clinics now carried on in connection with the school system having been equipped with a model outfit at the expense of the enthusiastic nurses themselves.
MRS. W. E. STRUTHERS
Besides nose-blowing drills Toronto has undertaken another departure in school health work, in establishing a real open-air school, on the model of the Forest School at Charlottenberg in Germany. To a private park on the outskirts of Toronto, which has been loaned for this purpose and equipped with shacks, fifty anaemic or delicate children were taken for three months last winter by special trolley cars each morning and not returned till twelve hours later, thus living and learning in the open air. No tubercular children were taken, sanatorium care being provided for them. Five meals are furnished, the trolley service is given free by the street railway company, a nurse is in attendance and three teachers, lessons are given for three and one-half hours in the open air. There is a great deal of outdoor play, and nose-blowing and toothbrush drills and a weekly bath form part of this school course, as well as a two-hour nap each day. The experiment has been so successful that the number of children will be increased next year to one hundred and the school term lengthened to six months.
As wife of Dr. W. E. Struthers, chief medical inspector of the schools, Mrs. Struthers will continue her interest in the physical care of school children. She will also have the direction of the work until her successor, not yet appointed, is broken in.
To make charity administration measure up to strict tests of business efficiency—this has been the ideal that Howell Wright has put in practice as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities. He has succeeded so well that Mayor Baker has recently appointed him superintendent of the City Hospital, with instructions to use the same methods there.