The annual report of a board of health should give as clear a picture of a community's health during the past week or past quarter as the ergograph gives of the pupils mentioned on page 126. As ragged, rapidly shortening lines show nervousness and depleted vitality, so charts and diagrams can be made to show the needless waste of infant life during the summer months, the price paid for bad ventilation in winter time, when closed windows cause the sickness-and-death line from diphtheria and scarlet fever to shoot up from the summer level. In cities it is now customary for health boards to report weekly the number of deaths from transmissible diseases. Health officers will gladly furnish facts as to cases of sickness, if citizens request them. Newspapers will gladly publish such information if any one will take the pains to supply it. Wherever newspapers have published this information, it quickly takes its place with the weather reports among the news necessities. Marked changes are commented on editorially. Children can easily be interested, as can adults, in filling out week by week a table that will show increases and decreases in preventable sickness due to transmissible diseases.

Table X

Cases of Infectious and Contagious Diseases Reported

WEEK ENDING
Oct.
26		Nov.
2		Nov.
9		Nov.
16		Nov.
23		Nov.
30		Dec.
7		Dec.
14		Dec.
21		Dec.
28		Jan.
4		Jan.
11		Jan.
18
Tuberculosis pulmonalis350350317364345337422360354308344432402
Diphtheria and croup313264283331282343326369338347308370406
Measles142212203261293323472471517346581691803
Scarlet fever208228231252278323372397417426478562585
Smallpox—1—1——2432—2—
Varicella40839116213611516716019812398199169
Typhoid fever106105107123867771623542375536
Whooping cough6131514279812193252414
Cerebro-spinal meningitis6113448151376 111613
Total1171126712501512145115351855184418881603188223512428

In cities where physicians are not compelled to notify the health board of danger centers,—that is, of patients sick from measles, smallpox, or diphtheria,—and in smaller communities where notices are sent only to state boards of health, parents will find it difficult to take a keen interest in vital statistics. But if teachers would start at the beginning of the year to record in such a table the days of absence from school because of transmissible disease, both they and their pupils would discover a new interest in efficient health administration. After a national board of health is organized we may reasonably expect that either state boards of education or state boards of health will regularly supply teachers with reports that will lead them to compare the vitality photographs of their own schools and communities with the vitality photographs of other schools and other communities working under similar conditions. Then children old enough to study physiology and hygiene will be made to see the happiness-giving possibilities of vitality tests and vital statistics.

VITAL STATISTICS CAN MAKE DISEASE CENTERS AS OBVIOUS AND AS OFFENSIVE AS THE SMOKE NUISANCE

Instead of discussing the theory of vital statistics, or the extent to which statistics are now satisfactory, it would be better for us at this point to make clear the significance of the movement for a national fact center for matters pertaining to personal, industrial, and community vitality. Five economic reasons are assigned for establishing a national department of health:

1. To enable society to increase the percentage of exceptional men of each degree, many of whom are now lost through preventable accidents, and also to increase the total population.

2. To lessen the burden of unproductive years by increasing the average age at death.