656 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



that such health education or advertisement should be an education 

 regarding the fundamental principles and established facts and not 

 regarding individuals or experimental ideas. In our advertising 

 campaign to reach the farmers we must suppress all personal refer- 

 ences and make our advertising carry sound and proved facts of sani- 

 tation. We must advertise our product and not our sales manager. 



The forms of publicity to be used in this educational campaign are 

 varied, and practically all of them are to-day being used in common 

 by commercial and health organizations. Press notices, which are 

 easily secured at small cost by a proper press agent, are of enormous 

 value. Special stories are gladly carried by newspapers if they do 

 not carry too much self-advertisement; billboards, magazine stories, 

 and articles, and special publications of various health departments 

 are being used daily in this work. In addition, lectures, exhibits, 

 special railroad exhibit cars, demonstrations in railway stations and 

 public places, all have their place and all are being used by public 

 health agencies. 



But these are not of themselves sufficient. They arouse the interest 

 or excite the curiosity of those whom we wish to reach, but they do 

 not give the individual the necessary impulse for immediate action. 

 We must have something more personal, more direct and impelling, 

 to obtain the results that are necessary. Here again the analogy with 

 selling forces of commercial concerns becomes striking. 



We must have a detailed field force. We must have a force which 

 will personally reach every farm whose sanitary condition we would 

 imiDrove. AVliile all local health organizations have this end in \'iew, 

 and the individual physician constitutes a powerful force, even these 

 must be aroused to their opportunities, must be educated and stimu- 

 lated as much as our lay constituency. They correspond, in the 

 analogy we have drawn, to the trade for the regTilar distribution of 

 our product. We have not created the need for the product until our 

 detail man has visited the consumer. 



In practice the effort to meet the need for detail work, especially 

 in connection with the hookworm, could be accomplished by the ap- 

 pointment of rural district inspectors. Each rural district inspector 

 could be assigned to an area of four or five counties, conveniently 

 located and accessible from some one point as headquarters. This 

 district inspector would correspond to the detail man in our selling 

 campaign. He goes into the district and visits first the physician, 

 taking with him his microscope, his literature, and a small amount of 

 properly prepared medicine. He should be a graduate physician, 

 qualified to practice medicine, but his whole time should be devoted 

 to the work and he should be allowed to accept no fees. On his visits 

 to the individual physician he interests him in the hookworm disease, 

 diagnoses a few cases for him, and treats several, in order to be sure 

 that the physician is thoroughly acquainted with the practical details 



