RURAL HEALTH PHYSICAL 193 



will not come of themselves. If we wish to see them realized, we 

 shall have to work for them at least as strenuously as we strive for 

 the other good things of life. 



CITY IS HEALTHIER FOR CHILDREN THAN 

 THE COUNTRY 1 



THOMAS D. WOOD 



MORE than half of the 20,000,000 school children in the United 

 States are attending rural schools. 



Country children attending the rural schools are less healthy 

 and are handicapped by more physical defects than are the 

 children of the cities (including all the children of the slums). 

 And this is true, in general, of all parts of the United States. 



My conclusions are based upon all the available official sta- 

 tistics of school children gathered from all parts of the country. 

 As many as 50 or more sources of information were used, and 

 the results compared and collated. These statistics lack uni- 

 formity. They contain, doubtless, many errors, but there are 

 probably as many errors in the statistics of the city school chil- 

 dren as in those of children in the rural schools. The com- 

 parative result, therefore, is accurate. 



In every health item the country child is more defective than 

 the city child. This is a most surprising reversal of popular 

 opinion. More than twice as many country children suffer from 

 malnutrition as do city children; the former are also more 

 anemic, have more lung trouble, and include more mental de- 

 fectives than do the latter. 



In an impartial effort to ascertain the causes of present-day 

 country life, so far as health and welfare are concerned, this fact 

 must not be overlooked: Artificial selection, during the last half 

 century especially, has drawn much of the best human stock 

 from the country to the cities. Before that time the tide in the 

 movement of population apparently carried more good human 

 material to the rural regions than away from them. 



Another reason for the physical inferiority of country school 



i Adapted from Philadelphia Public Ledger, April 2, 1910. 



