294 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



does the profession attract? How many are tuberculous? What pro- 

 portions suffer from insomnia, obsessions, neurasthenia, eye-strain, 

 headaches, heart-disturbances, indigestion, constipation, or other 

 functional derangements? What constitutes overwork of the teacher, 

 and what are its reflective effects upon the pupils? What is the status 

 of personal hygiene practise among teachers? How many of them are 

 in the " patent-medicine-stage " of ignorance ? What fraction of them 

 do not appreciate the difference between an oculist and an optician? 

 Is it vain to hope that our half million teachers may yet be made so 

 many missionaries of public health? If so, through what methods of 

 teaching hygiene in the schools? How do different methods of teach- 

 ing physiology and hygiene differ in their effects upon life habits? 

 What is the best approach in teaching " scientific temperance," or the 

 still more difficult subject of sex hygiene? Should the latter be taught 

 in the public school? At what age? What should be the content of 

 such instruction? 



The greatest problem of conservation relates not to forests or mines, 

 but to national vitality, and to conserve the latter we must begin by 

 conserving the child. Let it again he emphasized that hardly a 

 single one of the above questions is fully answerable to-day. Not 

 many of them will be fully resolved until they have been attacked on a 

 broad scale by systematic and scientific methods of research. To secure 

 proper scope for such research the schools must be thrown open to it; 

 to insure adequate support it must be made a public undertaking. The 

 school instead of causing sickness and deformity must be made to 

 preserve the child from all kinds of morbidity, repair his existent 

 deformities, combat his hereditary predispositions and the bad condi- 

 tions of his social environment, in a word fortify his constitution and 

 render him physically and mentally fit for the struggles of life-. The 

 value of research carried on for this purpose will depend most of all 

 upon the type of man intrusted with it. The teacher can not do it ; the 

 superintendent or principal can not do it; no more can the average 

 school physician. 



Who is the school physician and what has been his training? With 

 a few notable exceptions he probably differs little from the average 

 practising physician, and since the merciless brochure of Mr. Flexner 

 it is unnecessary to dwell at length on the positive unfitness of the 

 average physician for any research, to say nothing of the highly 

 specialized kinds here advocated. Suffice to say that Mr. Flexner finds 

 only about 30 respectable medical schools in the entire country; that 

 twenty years ago there was not one; that a large fraction of our 

 physicians " walked into the profession from the street " ; that over 

 one half the schools require less than a high school-course for entrance ; 

 that half or more have little or no laboratory facilities for physiology, 

 pharmacology or bacteriology; that many do not even teach the use of 



