Excerpt from The Training School Quarterly, Vol. 3: January, February, March, 1917

Again, the schools must teach health, not only individual health but community health. There are certain well known laws of health, certain known facts about contagious or infectious diseases that every teacher should make known to every child attending his school. I can remember when in our ignorance letters from a yellow-fever infected city were punctured and fumigated. Today we all know that screens to keep out mosquitoes is the best way to stop the spread of this dread disease. The schools must instill the laws Of health into the minds of the children, and each must be made to realize that it is wrong for him to spread his communicable disease to his neighbor. Our people must be taught that it is really not necessary for every person, sooner or later, to have measles and whooping-cough. The time is soon coming when we will realize that a county hospital maintained at public expense, and a whole - time health officer maintained at public expense, are good investments for each county to make. A healthy body is absolutely essential for a serv iceable citizen. Give us the right ideals and standards of health and the criminal classes and the feeble-minded will cease to multiply in our land. The institution at Kinston for the care of the feeble-minded - very neces sary now under existing conditions in our State - is a monument to our ignorance and inefficiency. About 20 per cent of the blind in our State School for the Blind and the Deaf in this city are needlessly blind. Ignorance - no, inefficiency - has made them so. All those children in the Stonewall Jackson Training School are there because we back home have failed to do our duty by them. Instead of helping each who is born to become the best possible of his type we have a great vortex of physical and mental ruin into which we have been pushing helpless babes and unfortunate youths, and then we spend much of our time and money trying to pull them out. Some we get out, others never come back, but all carry through life the marks of our failures. Public health must be taught in the public schools.

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