diseases and keep them from spreading, and they find and cure many children who are in the early stages of tuberculosis. They tell parents what to do for sick children. If the parents are too poor to pay for glasses, for dental work, for removing ad’en-oids from noses, or for any other trouble, the children can be treated at free dispensaries and hospitals. Every city has public hospitals supported by taxes, to take care of poor sick people. There are special wards for contagious diseases, and cities are beginning to build camp hospitals and sanitariums for people with tuberculosis.
One of the things that all cities and most towns do now, is to forbid spitting in public places. This is a filthy habit, very offensive to clean people. And now it cannot be allowed at all, because tuberculosis, "the great white plague," that kills so many thousands of people, is known to be spread by spitting. Signs forbidding it, and warning people that they will be fined, if caught, are put up in streetcars and public places. People are warned, too, not to use public drinking cups without washing them thoroughly. The only safe cup to use is your own, or one set in a fountain basin with water over- flowing it all the time.
After a child is reported well of scarlet fever or other contagious diseases by a doctor, city health officers come and disinfect the house. To disinfect is to kill the disease germs. They do this by filling the house with fumes of for-mal’de-hyde. Clothes that can be washed must be boiled. Rugs, mattresses and bedding are taken away to the city’s plant to be disinfected and returned. Then the warning card is taken down, and the family may mingle with other people.
You know how you like to be "head" in school—to be the best in everything. Cities like to be "head" in health. They keep records of the babies born, the number and ages of people who die in a year, and the diseases they die of. If a great number of deaths are from preventable accidents, or diseases caused by contagion, I bad water, bad food, or bad drainage through sewers, a city is very much ashamed. Besides, a city with a low health record is not a good place to live in, so people who move from one city to another avoid it. Cities are rivals for people, and trade. They all try to go "up head," in health. To get there takes an army of street cleaners and inspectors and officers., The work is hard and dirty, and often dangerous, and it is never done. The good-health brigade is always on duty, standing sentinel, cleaning camp, scouting for the enemy, and fighting the foes of dirt, disorder and disease. They are soldiers of peace.
