Part 5

“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.”

“Surely not!” protested the old lady. “Why, I’d rather have measles in the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet fever once.”

“You’re about ten times as likely to have.”

She looked puzzled. “But what did you mean by saying that one of ‘em is as bad as the other?”

“That it’s as dangerous to the community, though not to the individual.”

“Just a little deep for me, too,” confessed Mr. Clyde.

“Yet it’s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather be bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?”

“A mosquito, of course.”

“Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a mosquito country. You wouldn’t hesitate, on account of your health, to move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?”

“I suppose not.”

“But you _would_ be afraid to establish your family in the malarious swamps of the South?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, people who die of malaria die of mosquito bite, since the mosquito is the only agency of infection. Thus, it reduces to this: that while the individual rattler is more dangerous than the individual mosquito, the mosquito, in general, kills her thousands where the snake kills one. Now—with considerable modification of the ratio—scarlet fever is the rattlesnake; whooping-cough and measles are the mosquitoes. It is just as important to keep measles out of a community as it is to shut out scarlet fever. In fact, if you will study the records of this city, you will find that in two out of the last three years, measles has killed more people than scarlet fever, and whooping-cough more than either of them.”

“What are we going to do about it?” asked the practical-minded Mr. Clyde.

“Ah, if some one would only tell us that! In measles the worst of the harm is done before the disease announces itself definitely. The most contagious stage is previous to the appearance of the telltale rash. There’s nothing but a snuffling nose, and perhaps a very little fever to give advance notice that the sufferer is a firebrand.”

“Well, you can’t shut a child out of school for every little sore throat,” observed Mrs. Sharpless.

“As to that I’m not so sure,” replied the physician slowly and thoughtfully. “A recent writer on school epidemics has suggested educating the public to believe that every sore throat is contagious.”

“That isn’t true, is it?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“No. Personally I believe that, while a physician is often justified in deceiving his patient, he is never justified in fooling the public. In the long run they find him out and his influence for good is lessened. Yet that sore-throat theory is near enough true to be a strong temptation. Every sore throat is suspicious; that isn’t too much to say. And, with a thorough school-inspection system, it is quite possible that epidemics could be headed off by isolating the early-discovered cases of sore throat. But, an epidemic of the common contagions, once well under way, seems to be quite beyond any certainty of control.”

“Do you mean to say that quarantine and disinfection and isolation are all useless?” asked Mr. Clyde.

“No. I won’t go as far as that. They may exercise a check in some cases. But I will say this: that all our cumbersome and expensive and often harassing hygienic measures in the contagious diseases haven’t made good. Obviously, if they had, we should see a diminution of the ills which they are supposed to limit. There is no diminution. No, we’re on the wrong tack. Until we know what the right tack is, we perhaps ought to keep on doing what we can in the present line. It’s a big, complicated subject, and one that won’t be settled until we find out what scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough really are, and what causes them. While we’re waiting for the bacteriologist to tell us that, the soundest principle of defense that we have is to keep the body up to its highest pitch of resistance. That is why I support medical inspection for schools as an essential measure.”

“To repair the children without closing the schools, if I may modify Dr. Goler’s epigram,” suggested Mr. Clyde.

“Exactly. Eventually we shall have to build as well as repair. A very curious thing is happening to Young America in the Eastern States. The growing generation is shrinking in weight and height.”

“Which is almost contradictory enough for a paradox,” remarked Mr. Clyde.

“It’s a melancholy and literal fact. You know, there’s a height and weight basis for age upon which our school grading system rests. The authorities have been obliged to reconstruct it because the children are continuously growing smaller for their years. _There’s_ work for the inspection force!”

“You’d put the children on pulleys and stretch ‘em out, I suppose!” gibed Grandma Sharpless.

“That might work, too,” replied the doctor, unruffled. “The Procrustean system isn’t so bad, if old Procrustes had only sent his victims to the gymnasium instead of putting them to bed. Yes, a quarter of an hour with the weight-pulleys every day would help undersized kiddies a good deal. But principally I should want the school-inspectors to keep the youngsters playing.”

“You don’t have to teach a child to play,” sniffed Grandma Sharpless, with womanly scorn of mere man’s views concerning children.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Sharpless, you taught your children to play.”

“I! Whatever makes you think that?”

“The simple fact that they didn’t die in babyhood.”

Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a gump!”

“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh against himself.

“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do, that’s the fault of the speaker. And it _is_ a fact that every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live. Without that will to live none of us would survive.”

“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma Sharpless flatly.

“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable to nurse it?”

“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”

“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous: better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful, mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood, which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”

“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless. “There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”

“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the Committee on School of our household organization.”

He sent for eight-year-old Julia.

“Question to lay before you, Miss Chairwoman,” said Dr. Strong. “How many of the girls in your grade hang around the hall or doorways during recess?”

“Oh, lots!” said Julia promptly.

“Are they the bigger girls? or the smaller ones?” The Committee on School considered the matter gravely. “Mary Hinks, she’s tall, but she’s awful thin and sickly,” she pronounced. “Dot Griswold and Cora Smith and Tiny Warley—why, I guess they’re most all the littlest girls in the class.”

Dr. Strong nodded. “Sure to be the undernourished, anaemic, lethargic ones,” said he. “They’re forgetting the lessons of their babyhood. Insensibly they are losing the will to live. But there’s nobody to tell them so. A thorough medical inspection service would correct that. It would include school-nurses who would go to the homes of the children and tell the parents what was the matter. Such a system might not be warranted to keep epidemics out of our schools, but it would stretch out and fill out those meager youngsters’ brains as well as bodies, and fit them to combat illness if it did come. The whole theory of the school’s attitude toward the child seems to me misconceived by those who have charge of the system. It assumes too much in authority and avoids too much in responsibility.

“Take the case of John Smith, who has two children to bring up under our enlightened system of government. Government says to John Smith, ‘Send your children to school!’ ‘Suppose I don’t wish to?’ says John Smith. ‘You’ve got to,’ says Government. ‘It isn’t safe for me to have them left uneducated.’ ‘Will you take care of them while they’re at school?’ says John Smith. ‘I’ll train their minds,’ says Government. ‘What about their bodies?’ says John Smith. ‘Hm!’ says Government; ‘that’s a horse of another color.’ ‘Then I’ll come with them and see that they’re looked after physically,’ says John Smith. ‘You _will_ not!’ says Government. ‘I’m _in loco ‘parentis_, while they’re in school.’ ‘Then you take the entire _loco_ of the _parentis_,’ says John Smith. ‘If you take my children away on the ground that you’re better fitted to care for their minds than I am, you ought to be at least as ready to look after their health. Otherwise,’ says John Smith, ‘go and teach yourself to stand on your head. You can’t teach _my_ children.’ Now,” concluded Dr. Strong, “do you see any flaws in the Smith point of view?”

“Just plain common sense,” approved Grandma Sharpless.

“Clyde,” said Dr. Strong, with a twinkle, “if you don’t stop rubbing a hole in your chin, I’ll have to repair _you_. What’s preying on your mind?”

“I am trying,” replied Mr. Clyde deliberately, “to figure out, with reference to the School Superintendent and myself, just how a man who has made a fool of himself can write a letter to another man who has helped the first man make a fool of himself, admitting that he’s made a fool of himself, and yet avoid embarrassment, either to the man who has made a fool of himself or to the other man who aided the man in making a fool of himself. Do you get that?”

Dr. Strong rose. “I’m a Chinese doctor,” he observed, “not a Chinese puzzle-solver. That’s a matter between you and your ink-well. Meantime, having attained the point for which I’ve been climbing, I now declare this session adjourned.”

IV. THE CORNER DRUG-STORE

“No, it won’t add to the attractiveness of the neighborhood, perhaps,” said Mrs. Clyde thoughtfully. “But how convenient it will be!”

Mr. Clyde had come home with the news that a drug-store was to be opened shortly on the adjacent corner. Shifting his position to dodge a foliage-piercing shaft of sunlight—they were all sitting out on the shady lawn, in the cool of a September afternoon—Dr. Strong shook his head.

“Too convenient, altogether,” he observed.

“How’s that?” queried Mr. Clyde. “A drugstore is like a gun in Texas: you may not need it often, but when you do need it, you need it like blazes.”

“True enough. But most people over-patronize the drug-store.”

“Not this family; at least, since our house-doctor came to keep us well on the Chinese plan,” said Mrs. Clyde gracefully.

But Dr. Strong only looked rueful. “Your Chinese doctor has to plead guilty to negligence of what has been going on under his very nose.”

“Oh, not more trouble!” pleaded Mrs. Clyde. She had come through the dreaded ordeal of little Betty’s operation for adenoids—which had proved to be, after all, so slight and comparatively painless—with a greatly augmented respect for and trust in Dr. Strong; but her nerves still quivered.

“Nothing to trouble you,” the doctor assured her, “but enough to make me feel guilty—and stupid. Have you noticed any change in Manny, lately?”

“Manny” was fourteen-year-old Maynard Clyde, the oldest of the children; a high school lad, tall, lathy, athletic, and good-tempered.

“The boy is as nervous as a witch,” put in Grandma Sharpless. “I’ve noticed it since early summer.”

“Then I wish you had taught me my trade,” said Dr. Strong. “Manny is so husky and active that I’ve hardly given him a thought.”

“Well, what’s wrong with him?” asked the father anxiously.

“Too much drug-store,” was the prompt reply. “Not drugs!” cried Mrs. Clyde, horrified. “That child!”

“Well, no; not in the sense you mean it. Wait; there he is now. Manny!” he called, raising his voice. “Come over here a minute, will you?” The boy ambled over, and dropped down on the grass. He was brown, thin, and hard-trained; but there was a nervous pucker between his eyes, which his father noted for the first time. “What’s this? A meeting of the Board? Anything for the Committee on Milk Supply to do?” he asked.

“Not at present,” answered Dr. Strong, “except to answer a question or two. You don’t drink coffee, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m trying for shortstop on the junior nine, you know.”

“How are you making out?”

“Rotten!” said the boy despondently. “I don’t seem to have any grip on myself this year. Sort o’ get the rattles.”

“Hm-m-m. Feel pretty thirsty after the practice, and usually stop in at the soda-fountain for some of those patent soft drinks advertised to be harmless but stimulating, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said the boy, surprised.

“Ah,” said the doctor carelessly; “three or four glasses a day, I suppose?”

Manny thought a moment. “All of that,” he said.

“Well, you quit it,” advised the doctor, “if you want to make the ball team. It will put you off your game worse than tea or coffee. Tell the athletic instructor I said so, will you?”

“Sure!” said the boy. “I didn’t know there was any harm in it.”

As Manny walked away, Dr. Strong turned to

Mr. Clyde. “I found out about Manny by accident. No wonder the boy is nervous. He’s been drinking that stuff like water, with no thought of what’s in it.”

“What _is_ in it?” said Mrs. Clyde.

“Caffeine, generally. The most widely used of the lot is a mixture of fruit syrups doctored up with that drug. There’s as much nerve-excitation in a glass of it—yes, and more—than in a cup of strong coffee. What would you think of a fourteen-year-old boy who drank five cups of strong coffee every day?”

“I’d think his parents were fools,” declared Grandma Sharpless bluntly.

“Or his physician,” suggested Dr. Strong. “I’ve seen cases of people drinking twenty to twenty-five glasses of that ‘harmless’ stuff every day. Of course, they were on the road to nervous smash-up. But the craving for it was established and they hadn’t the nerve to stop.”

“The soda-fountain as a public peril,” said Mr. Clyde, with a smile.

“There’s more in that than can be smiled away,” retorted the doctor vigorously. “What between nerve-foods that are simply disguised ‘bracers,’ and dangerous, heart-depressing dopes, like bromo-seltzer, the soda-fountain does its share of damage in the community.”

“What about soda-water; that is innocent, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Yes. If the syrups are pure, soda-water is a good thing in moderation. So are the mineral waters. But there is this to be said about soda-water and candy, particularly the latter—”

“I’ve always said,” broke in Grandma Sharpless, “that candy-eating would ruin any digestion.”, “Then you’ve always been wrong, ma’am,” said Dr. Strong. “Candy, well and honestly made, is excellent food at the proper time. The trouble is, both with candy and with the heavy, rich soda-waters, that people are continually filling up with them between meals. Now the stomach is a machine with a great amount of work to do, and is entitled to some consideration. Clyde, what would happen to the machines in your factory, if you didn’t give them proper intervals of rest?”

“They’d be very short-lived,” said Mr. Clyde. “There’s a curious thing about machinery which everybody knows but nobody understands: running a machine twenty-four hours a day for one week gives it harder wear than running it twelve hours a day for a month. It needs a regular rest.”

“So with the machinery of digestion,” said the doctor. “The stomach and intestines have their hard work after meals. How are they to rest up, if an odd lot of candy or a slab of rich ice-cream soda come sliding down between whiles to be attended to? Eat your candy at the end of a meal, if you want it. It’s a good desert. But whatever you eat, give your digestion a fair chance.”

“You can digest anything if you use Thingumbob Pills,” observed Mr. Clyde sardonically. “The newspapers say so.”

“That’s the kind of doctrine that makes dyspeptics,” returned Dr. Strong. “The American stomach is the worst-abused organ in creation. Saliva is the true digestive. If people would take time to chew properly, half the dyspepsia-pill fakers would go out of business. If they’d take time to exercise properly, the other half would disappear.”

“Liver pills were my regular dependence a few years ago,” remarked Mr. Clyde. “Since I took up hand-ball I haven’t needed them. But I suppose that half the business men in town think they couldn’t live without drugging themselves two or three times a week.”

“Undoubtedly. Tell the average American any sort of a lie in print, about his digestion, and he’ll swallow it whole, together with the drug which the lie is intended to sell. Look at the Cascaret advertising. Its tendency is to induce, not an occasional recourse to Cascarets, but a steady use of them. Any man foolish enough to follow the advice of the advertisements would form a Cascaret habit and bring his digestion into a state of slavery. That sort of appeal has probably ruined more digestions and spoiled more tempers than any devil-dogma ever put into type.”

“Castor-oil is good enough for me,” said Grandma Sharpless emphatically.

“It’s good enough for anybody—that is to say, bad enough and nasty enough so that there isn’t much danger of its being abused. But these infernal sugar-coated candy cathartics get a hold on a man’s intestinal organization so that it can’t do its work without ‘em, and, Lord knows, it can’t stand their stimulus indefinitely. Then along comes appendicitis.”

“But some of the laxative medicines advertise to prevent appendicitis,” said Mrs. Clyde.

Dr. Strong’s face was very grim. “Yes, they advertise. Commercial travelers, because of their irregular habits, are great pill-guzzlers as a class. Appendicitis is a very common complaint among them. A Pittsburgh surgeon with a large practice among traveling men has kept records, and he believes that more than fifty per cent of the appendicitis cases he treats are caused by the ‘liver-pill’ and ‘steady-cathartic’ habit. He explains his theory in this way. The man begins taking the laxative to correct his bad habits of life. Little by little he increases his dose, as the digestive mechanism grows less responsive to the stimulus, until presently an overdose sets his intestines churning around with a violence never intended by nature. Then, under this abnormal peristalsis, as it is called, the appendix becomes infected, and there’s nothing for it but the surgeon’s knife.”

“Would you have people run to the doctor and pay two dollars every time their stomach got a little out of kilter?” asked Mrs. Sharpless shrewdly.

“Run to the doctor; run to the minister; run to the plumber; run anywhere so long as you run far enough and fast enough,” answered Dr. Strong with a smile. “A mile a day at a good clip, or three miles of brisk walking would be the beginning of a readjustment. Less food more slowly eaten and no strong liquors would complete the cure in nine cases out of ten. The tenth case needs the doctor; not the newspaper-and-drug-store pill.”

“But all patent medicines aren’t bad, are they?” asked Mrs. Clyde. “Some have very good testimonials.”

“Bought or wheedled. Any medicine which claims to _cure_ is a fraud and a swindle.”

“Don’t tell me, young man!” said Grandma Sharpless. “You doctors are prejudiced against patent medicines, but we old folks have used ‘em long enough to know which are good and which are bad. Now I don’t claim but what the Indian herb remedies and the ‘ready reliefs’ and that lot are frauds. But my family was brought up on teething powders and soothing syrups.”

“Then you’re fortunate,” said Dr. Strong sternly, “that none of them has turned out to be an opium fiend.”

The instant he said it, he saw, with sharp regret, that his shaft had sped true to the mark. The clear, dark red of a hale old age faded from Grandma Sharpless’s cheeks. Mr. Clyde shot a quick glance of warning at him.

“And speaking of Indian remedies,” went on the doctor glibly, “I remember as a boy—”

“Stop a minute,” said Grandma Sharpless steadily. “The truth isn’t going to hurt me. Or, if it does hurt, maybe it’s right it should. I had a younger brother who died in a sanitarium for drug-habit when he was twenty-four. As a child he pretty nearly lived on soothing syrups; had to have them all the time, because he was such a nervous little fellow; always having earache and stomach-ache, until he was eight or nine years old. Then he got better and became a strong, active boy, and a robust man. After his college course he went to Philadelphia, and was doing well when he contracted the morphine habit—how or why, we never knew. It killed him in three years. Do you think—is it possible that the soothing syrups—I’ve heard they have morphine in them—had anything to do with his ruin?”