Any place where numbers of people are accustomed to assemble favors the propagation of germs,--whether it be the meetinghouse, the townhall, the theater, or the school. Every teacher can be the sanitary engineer of her own schoolroom, school, or community by cooeperating with the school doctor, the town board of health, family physicians, and mothers. Every teacher can exterminate disease by applying the very same principles to her schoolroom as Chief Medical Inspector Gorgas applied to Panama. Knowledge, disinfection, absolute cleanliness, education, and inspection are the essential steps. First she must know that "children's diseases" are not necessary. She should discountenance the old superstition that every child must run the gamut of children's diseases, that every child must sooner or later have whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, scarlet fever, just as they used to think yellow fever and cholera inevitable. The price of this terrible ignorance has been not only expense, loss of time, acquisition of permanent physical defects, and loss of vitality, but, for the majority of children, death before reaching five years of age. All these "catching" diseases are germ diseases, which disinfection can eliminate. The free use of strong yellow soap and disinfectants on the school floor, windows, benches, desks, blackboards, pencils, in the coat closets and toilets, plus the natural disinfectants, hot sun and oxygen, will prevent the schoolroom from being a source of danger. One or more of these germ-killing remedies must be constantly applied; cleansing deserves a larger part in every school budget. Often country towns are as ignorant of the existence of germs and of the means of preventing the spread of disease as the woman in a small country town who used daily to astound the neighbors by the "shower of snow" she produced by shaking the bedding of her sick child out of the window. Their astonishment was soon changed to panic when that shower of snow resulted in a deadly epidemic of scarlet fever. Medical inspection of New York City's schools was begun after an epidemic of scarlet fever was traced to a popular boy who passed around among his schoolmates long rolls of skin from his fingers.