COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES AND HEALTH 



359 



most people are ignorant in regard to the conditions of health. 

 The vast patent-medicine business represents a great amount of 

 suffering as well as a great amount of injury caused by supposed 



1905 



1906 



1907 



1908 



1909 



1910 



1911 



1912 



1913 



1914 



1915 



1916 



1917 



1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 



Fig. 1 66. The reduction of infant mortality in New York City 



This diagram shows, month by month, for a period of nineteen years, the proportion 

 of infants (under one year old) who died to the infants born. There is a variation 

 from month to month, with a very striking increase in the number of deaths during 

 the summer months. When the records showed this big jump in 1905, physicians 

 and nurses and sanitary experts at once took steps to discover the causes and to 

 devise preventive measures. Year by year we can see a steady improvement. So 

 much effort has been made to protect the children for the bad month of July that in 

 recent years this month has shown off rather better than the others, and August 

 and September have become the bad months. With increased knowledge, and espe- 

 cially with wider application of the knowledge we already have, the high points on 

 these black spots will be cut down, and the general level of the spots will be consid- 

 erably lowered. This is but another way of showing that applied biology saves 



hundreds of thousands of lives 



remedies. The regulation of what some consider private busi- 

 ness is accordingly being extended so as to require manu- 

 facturers to state what their products contain. Some states 



