324 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



for all forms of necessary common action. We have in New York state, 

 a corps of district sanitary supervisors, who form a link between the 

 State Department of Health and the local health officer, bringing to the 

 latter the expert knowledge and the moral support of the whole state. 

 We have a State Sanitary Officers' Association, which is now being or- 

 ganized in county branches. Beyond the health officers, we want the 

 leaders of the public to be informed as to local health needs and ready 

 to move effectively to meet them. If each city and town and rural 

 county had a group of public-spirited citizens organized to seek out and 

 solve the more pressing problems of their particular locality, and to 

 support the local and state authorities in the general conduct of the 

 public health campaign, progress could be made by leaps and bounds. 

 To-day we find in many a city an anti-tuberculosis association, a 

 milk committee, a visiting nurse association, an associated charities and 

 various churches' and merchants' associations and other bodies dealing 

 with phases of health work, often working at cross purposes with each 

 other and with the local health department. These forces should be 

 knit together in local health associations like the revolutionary commit- 

 tees of correspondence for community defense against disease. They 

 should be kept in communication with each other and with the most 

 recent current advances in sanitary theory and practise, perhaps by 

 developing them as local branches of the American Public Health Asso- 

 ciation. Plans are now under way in New York State for the organi- 

 zation of such militia companies. We have thought of many titles. 

 Health Association, Health League, Life Extension League, Life 

 Lengthening League, without finding quite the right one ; but the thing 

 itself we are sure we need. 



Is it not time that a serious effort was made along some such lines 

 as those I have outlined, to mobilize our people for the public health? 

 The nation that first really accomplishes this task will be so strong, and 

 at the same time so sensitive of the sacredness of human life, that 

 neither the fear of others nor its own aggression will be likely to com- 

 pel it to mobilize for any less noble cause. 



SOME EESULTS OF PERIODIC HEALTH EXAMINATIONS 



By EUGENE L. FISK, M.D. 



DIRECTOR OP HYGIENE^ LIFE EXTENSION INSTITUTE, INC. 



OF the terrible engines of destruction that science, the handmaiden 

 of war as well as of peace, has brought to the firing line in this 

 present world conflict, there is none more terrible for offense, more po- 

 tent for defense, than that war engine supplied by nature — man. 



Even the prevision of military experts was at fault as to the line 

 along which modern warfare would be waged. Wlien it was reported 



