Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
Just as there should be a central bureau to count and correct the open
mouths and closed minds that clog the little old red schoolhouse of the
country, so a central bureau should discover in the city teacher as
well as in the country teacher the ailments more serious than
tuberculosis that pass from teacher to pupil; slovenliness, ugly
temper, frowning, crossness, lack of ambition, cynicism,--these should
be blackballed as well as consumption, contagious morphine habit, and
contagious skin disease. Crooked thinking by teacher leads to crooked
thinking by pupil. Disregard of health laws by teacher encourages
unhygienic living by pupils. A man whose fingers are yellow, nerves
shaky, eyes unsteady, and mind alternately sleepy and hilarious from
cigarettes, cannot convey pictures of normal, healthy physical living,
nor can he successfully teach the moral and social evils of nicotinism.
Both teacher and pupil have a right to the periodic physical
examination of teachers that will give timely warning of attention
needed. Until there is some system for giving this right to all
teachers in private, parochial, charitable, and public schools, we
shall produce many nervous, acrid, and physically threadbare teachers,
where we should have only teachers who inspire their pupils with a
passion for health by the example of a good complexion, sprightly step,
bounding vitality, and forceful personality born of hygienic living.
PART III. COOePERATION IN MEETING HEALTH OBLIGATIONS
CHAPTER XVI
EUROPEAN REMEDIES: DOING THINGS AT SCHOOL
Recently I traveled five hundred miles to address an audience on
methods of fitting health remedies to local health needs. I told of
certain dangers to be avoided, of results that had always followed
certain remedies, of motives to be sought and used, of community ends
to seek. Not knowing the local situation, I could not tell them exactly
what to do next, or how or with whom to do it; not seeing the patient
or his symptoms, I did not diagnose the disease or prescribe medicine.
Several members of the audience who were particularly anxious to start
a new organization on a metropolitan model were disappointed because
they were told, not just how to organize, but rather how to find out
what sort of organization their town needed. They were right in
believing that it was easier to copy on paper a plan tried somewhere
else, than to think out a plan for themselves. They had forgotten for
the time being their many previous disappointments due to copying
without question some plan of social work, just as they copy Paris or
New York fashions. They had not expected to leave this meeting with the
conviction that while the _ends_ of sanitary administration may be the
same in ten communities, health _machinery_ should fit a particular
community like a tailor-made suit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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