This was the beginning of what we call vaccination; and as soon as it was found that this scratching of the arm and putting a little of this vaccine matter into it would cause only a few days of feverishness, and then after that give complete protection against smallpox, the Boards of Health all over the civilized world took it up and insisted upon everybody’s being vaccinated when a baby.
As a result, smallpox has become one of the rarest, instead of the commonest, of our infectious diseases. Only a few dozen people die of it each year in Europe, instead of several hundred thousands; scarcely one one-hundredth of the people now in our blind asylums have been sent there by smallpox, and I dare say that many of you have never even seen a pock-marked person.
Another disease that used to be very dangerous to little children is diphtheria. It was not only very infectious, but very deadly; and nearly half of the children who took it died of it, and the doctors didn’t know anything that would cure it. About twenty years ago, two great scientists, one a Frenchman named Roux—a student of the great Professor Louis Pasteur, of whom I am sure you have heard—and the other, a German, named Behring, discovered an antitoxin for diphtheria; that is, something to defeat the poison of the diphtheria germ. When this antitoxin is injected into the blood, it will cure diphtheria.
The doctors and the Boards of Health took this up too, and insisted upon its being used in all cases; with the result that where the antitoxin is used early, scarcely one in twenty of the patients dies, instead of eight or ten out of twenty, as before.
You know how careful we are all trying to be not to let consumption spread. By insisting that all houses shall be built so as to give plenty of light and fresh air to everyone; and by forbidding spitting upon the streets; and by insisting that food to be sold, especially milk, shall be clean,—by preventing the spread of the disease in every way, our Boards of Health have cut down the number of deaths from this disease nearly one half; and people in the United States, for instance, or in England, where these health laws are enforced, live now almost exactly twice as long on the average as they did one hundred years ago, or as they do now in India and in Turkey, for instance, where the people are ignorant and dirty and careless.
So you see that even if some of the health regulations do seem rather troublesome and fussy, it is well worth while to try to follow them and help the health inspectors in every way. Even little children can help very much in keeping the houses and the cities in which they live clean and healthful and beautiful.
WORK AND PLAY
I. GROWING STRONG
