626 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 775 



hygienic teachings, and especially for its 

 technique, in more detail but still without 

 any attempt to exhaust the subject, as a sug- 

 gestion to those more actiyely engaged in 

 pure teaching than himself. 



Bacteriology for the General Student.— 

 Huxley somewhere has said that if it were in- 

 evitable that every human being must at some 

 time in his life play a game of chess against 

 an expert, the stakes being his continued 

 existence, then the parent or state might well 

 be indicted for criminal negligence if no 

 knowledge of the great game were taught. A 

 better parable concerning the teaching of 

 bacteriology to the general citizen could not 

 well be offered. Surely if it is worth while 

 for children to spend years in studying music, 

 geography, the higher mathematics, the dead 

 languages and many other subjects not 

 strictly necessary to existence — ^most of which 

 are never used by the great mass of the public, 

 all of which, except in their simplest forms 

 are quickly forgotten by the average citizen — 

 all of which must be entirely relearned by the 

 occasional individual who intends to become 

 an expert in them — why should not children 

 be taught the fundamentals of a subject of 

 daily importance to them throughout the rest 

 of their lives ? The present teaching of physi- 

 ology in the public schools is really academic, 

 for so much of it as may have any slight re- 

 flex of physiological truth is but dimly under- 

 stood by either the teacher or the child, and is 

 at best quickly confused and forgotten. More- 

 over, the complicated nature of the whole 

 teaching in modern physiology is such that 

 even the physician can use little of it in prac- 

 tise and draws no deductions from it without 

 the most exhaustive tests of his deductions 

 before daring to apply them. What then can 

 be the value of the deductions for leading a 

 hygienic life which the child may draw from 

 public-school physiology, when the fact is that 

 he generally leaves school at fourteen or six- 

 teen, i. e., before his mental grasp is well de- 

 veloped? The best known investigators of the 

 relatively simple questions of dietetics swing 

 from one extreme to the other notwithstanding 

 long years of intimate anatomical and physi- 



ological study in the most highly equipped 

 laboratories. Within five years, minimum 

 feeding; maximum feeding; complete masti- 

 cation; bolting the food whole; a selected diet 

 carefully weighed, measured and calculated; 

 and free feeding at the dictates of the appe- 

 tite have all been advocated by our " highest 

 authorities." What can the study of a mere 

 diagram of the intestinal tract and the learn- 

 ing of the names of different portions of the 

 gut do in enabling the future citizen to decide 

 how or what to eat ? Consider the case of a na- 

 tive South Sea Islander if the study of a rail- 

 way map of the Twentieth Century Limited, 

 printed in a foreign language, and demon- 

 strated by a fellow savage, be the sole available 

 source of knowledge on the subject of railway 

 transportation on which he is to decide what 

 produce to ship and how and when to ship it? 

 Bacteriology as compared with physiology 

 is a relatively simple matter. Its fundamen- 

 tals are fixed; so far as deductions of value to 

 the ordinary citizen are concerned, any one 

 can make them who knows the merest rudi- 

 ments. Its basic elements do not require for 

 demonstration the elaborate apparatus and 

 animal experimentation of the physiologist — 

 the elements can be worked out in the kitchen 

 — as the writer worked them out years ago. 

 Imagine the whole population having even so 

 much real first-hand experimental knowledge 

 of bacteriology as a medical student at the 

 end of his first three weeks' bacterial training. 

 At least the principles of the transfer of un- 

 seen infection on hands and utensils would be 

 known and the general rules as to distribution 

 of bacteria, sterilization of foods, utensils, etc. 

 Above all, the personal defense by the indi- 

 vidual upon which must always rest the ulti- 

 mate escape from infectious diseases would 

 be understood and its simple methods learned. 

 In the great campaigns now waging against 

 tuberculosis and other infectious diseases in 

 mankind, the education of the people is the 

 great cry. Unfortunately this education has 

 so far consisted chiefly in teaching the etiol- 

 ogy, pathology, distribution and economics of 

 disease — mere formularies to the average 

 mind, like the statistics concerning alcohol 



