August,:1910.1 



157 



Miicellaneous, 



tors of the South have seen little, under- 

 sized, pale, sallow, breathless, bloated 

 children. Sometimes it is attributed to 

 chronic malaria ; sometimes to chewing 

 resin, sometimes to eating dirt. The 

 mothers called them " puny " and dosed 

 them on vinegar in which rusty nails 

 have stood for several days. Medical 

 men attributed the condition of the 

 patients to lack of iron in the system, 

 and administered cinders, tincture and 

 filings. But now we know that the 

 hookworm was the cause of all the 

 mischief. 



As the disease progresses the child be- 

 comes worse and worse. At first per- 

 haps the eyes are a little swollen when 

 the child gets up in the morning. Later 

 the feet and legs begin to swell, and then 

 the bloating becomes general. The 

 protruding abdomen is tender, shortness 

 of breath supervenes, the whites of the 

 eyes become more and more balanced, 

 the lips more and more livid, the ears 

 more and more translucent, headache 

 more and more constant, the child more 

 and more helpless, till in some cases 

 death relieves the little sufferer. In 

 others they continue not to live but to 

 exist. They have not the size of their 

 age, nor the strength of their size, nor 

 the vivacity of childhood, nor the 

 intelligence they inherit. They can't 

 exercise for lack of breath, they can't 

 study for lack of nerve force, they can't 

 grow, for it takes all they can do to 

 keep alive. And as the years pass on, 

 these little dwarfs in body and mind 

 fail to come to the estate of manhood — 

 or womanhood. The one develops little 

 or no beard, the other is as flat-chested 

 when she ceases to grow as she was 

 when i child — both of lower order of 

 intelligence than their parents ; and so 

 it goes through generation after gener- 

 ation, each getting weaker and weaker, 

 both physically and mentally. 



Thus thousands of children have been 

 robbed of their birthright of a healthy 

 childhood— dwarfed in body and mind, 

 prematurely old and still developed. 

 And yet, amazing as the statement may 

 seem, it is a fact that by the use, under 

 prescription, of fifty or seventy-five 

 cents worth of two of the cheapest and 

 commonest drugs— epsom salts and thy- 

 mol — for a period of from one to ten 

 weeks the worst sufferers from hook- 

 worm disease can be restored to health 

 and to their natural vivacity and 

 brought to the normal estate of man- 

 hood and womanhood. And it is my 

 work and yours to spread the know- 

 ledge of this vital fact, to point out the 

 way in which physical salvation lies, 

 for the final solution of this problem is 

 with the people themselves. 



A hundred years ago the greatest 

 scourge to humanity was small-pox. A 

 woman knew that the chances of the 

 baby in her arms dying of small-pox 

 before it reached the age of five, were 

 one to three, Every woman in Europe 

 whose face was not pockmarked was 

 considered beautiful. As soon as a way 

 to prevent all this became known the 

 people took hold, and now a case of 

 small-pox in a community occasions no 

 more alarm than a case of mumps. 



Yellow fever, which hung like a pall 

 over the southern United States for one 

 hundred and sixteen years, is now, 

 except in sanitary circles, hardly given 

 a passing thought. As soon as the people 

 see a way to correct these evils they are 

 promptly corrected. It is reckoned that 

 a judicious expenditure of two to three 

 million dollars would revolutionise exist- 

 ing sanitary conditions in the South, to 

 a great exteut wiping out the hookworm 

 and uplifting the entire tenant white 

 population. 



It is the ignorance and carelessness of 

 the white landlord that are responsible 

 for the present unsanitary conditions ; 

 and five great States in the South are 

 now confronted with the grim fact that 

 " their labour problem is the problem of 

 soil pollution and the hookworm disease." 

 The elimination of the hookworm would 

 reduce so markedly the child death rate 

 that only a few years would elapse 

 before there would be plenty of white 

 labour to supply the South. Incident- 

 ally there would be enough boys and 

 girls over fourteen years of age to run the 

 spinning rooms, and the cotton mills 

 would be willing and glad enough to use 

 them instead of younger children, 



Thymol is the most approved medicine 

 used in the treatment of the hookworm 

 disease, but the drug is so powerful and 

 the dangers of an overdose are so great 

 that its administration should always be 

 left in the hands of a physician. 



It is a curious fact that hardly one of 

 these two million sufferers knows or even 

 suspects that he is the victim of an 

 internal parasite that is responsible for 

 the terribly backward state of the 

 South. In some districts their affliction 

 is referred to as " the big lazy," in others 

 as " the lazy sickness," In speaking of 

 his sickness each victim refers to it by 

 the name of the symptom most pro- 

 minent in his case. Thus one will say 

 he has " the bloat," another that he has 

 " stomach trouble," and a third that he 

 " feels tired all the time." 



For a great many years the patent 

 medicine man has exploited this unfor- 

 tunate class with a " sure cure," at a dollar 



