SYMPOSIUM ON SCIENCE AND RECONSTRUCTION 39 



The physical examination carried out by the Exemption 

 Boards in the creation of the new National Army, how- 

 ever, gave lis a definite idea of tlie extent of which serious 

 disease prevails in the rank and file of the people, gener- 

 ally unrecognized by those individuals until relatively far 

 advanced. 



The results observed by some of these Exemption Boards 

 were astonishing and aroused the more or less preoccupied 

 public officials to an activity which the nation had never 

 before known. The American people, with admirable 

 spirit, accepted the dictum that every public and private 

 interest must be regarded as secondary to the successful 

 pursuit of the war, and to this end traditions, customs and 

 prejudices were swept away as they could not have been 

 under other conditions. 



Without the records of the first draft, which, unfortu- 

 nately, were not preserved, it is estimated that over seventy- 

 five thousand young men were rejected by the Exemption 

 Boards on account of tuberculosis, and it was found tluit, 

 with the necessarily hasty examination made by these 

 Boards, thousands of others had been passed who were 

 suffering from this very evasive disease. On this account, 

 and very largely through the personal influence of Colonel 

 Frank Billings of Illinois, the Surgeon General of the 

 United States Army designated over two hundred tubercu- 

 losis experts to re-examine the recruits in the camps and 

 cantonments with the result that approximately twenty- 

 five thousand young men were discharged from service on 

 account of tuberculosis. 



The importance which the Federal Government and all 

 European nations attached to tuberculosis as a war-time 

 problem, made it very easy for state health departments to 

 formulate new rules and regulations for the control of the 

 disease, requiring the reporting of all known or suspected 

 cases to the local health authorities and empowering such 

 authorities to isolate and segregate the victims of open 

 disease. 



A feature of the regulations promulgated in Illinois as 

 a part of a very comprehensive tuberculosis war-time pro- 

 gram, is tlie requirement that the pliysician shall advise 

 the patient and members of his family as to the exact na- 



