502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pensary, and a fourth school in a representative well-to-do district of the 

 city. It was impossible for us to go over the cards for all the children 

 of those four schools, so we decided to take as many cards as we could 

 get for one class of each grade of the schools in question, endeavoring in 

 this way to bring into the study children of all ages in each school. In 

 all we have examined 1,452 records. From these closed records for the 

 first term of 1912-1913 1 we have tabulated the number of children suf- 

 fering from physical defects, but have not included cases of contagious 

 diseases or communicable diseases of the eye and skin, as they are being 

 treated in schools, so that our inquiry referred only to cases of defective 

 vision, defective hearing; defective teeth, primary and permanent; de- 

 fective nasal breathing; enlarged tonsils; defective nutrition; cardiac, 

 nervous and pulmonary diseases; and orthopedic defects. 



There were 1,617 cases of these defects alone noted for the 1,452 

 children whose records were examined. Bad teeth constituted two thirds 

 of the defects. "While the per cent, of all the defective children found 

 among those investigated in the four schools, exclusive of bad teeth, was 

 41, it varied from school to school. It was 40 per cent, on the lower east 

 side, 54 per cent, on the east side in the neighborhood of 30th Street; 

 21 per cent, in the well-to-do uptown district, and 50 per cent, on the 

 upper east side near 103d Street. Of all the defects, bad teeth were most 

 poorly attended to. In the school in the foreign district of the city 

 where cooperation of the school with the medical corps was very good, 

 90 per cent, of the cases of defective permanent teeth were treated, but 

 none of the 147 children with carious milk teeth received any treatment. 

 In the school where cooperation was poor, 28 per cent, of cases with de- 

 fective permanent teeth were treated and no primary teeth defects were 

 reported remedied. In the school in the well-to-do section of the city, 

 56 per cent, of cases of bad permanent teeth were treated and 17 per 

 cent, of bad primary teeth. For the school near the dispensary, 35 per 

 cent, of bad permanent teeth is reported as treated, and out of the 239 

 cases of primary bad teeth only 1 is reported as having been treated. As 

 to other defects the cooperating school reported 94 per cent, of children 

 with defects receiving treatment as against 65 per cent, for the school 

 whose attitude was antagonistic to the Department of Health. The 

 well-to-do section school reported 80 per cent, of its defective children 

 under treatment, and the school near the dispensary reported 86 per 

 cent, under treatment. If the teeth defects be counted in, then the per 

 cent, of treatments for all the defects, other than communicable eye and 

 skin diseases, will respectively be : 47 per cent., 32 per cent., 54 per cent, 

 and 41 per cent. As to individual defects, the following table shows the 

 per cent, of treatment in the case of four chief classes of defects : 



1 In the case of School No. 171, the cards for the year 1911-12 were used, 

 because the records for the first term of 1912-13 were unsatisfactory 



