In the great dispensary a little girl of tender years stands holding up a baby not yet able to walk. She is a “little mother,” that most pathetic of all poverty’s victims, her childhood taken away and the burden of womanly cares thrust upon her. “Please, doctor, do somethin’ fer baby!” she pleads. Baby is sick unto death, but she does not realize it. Its breath comes in short, wheezy gasps; its skin burns, and its little eyes glow with the brightness that doctors and nurses dread. One glance is all the doctor needs; in that brief glance he sees the ill-shaped head and the bent and twisted legs that tell of rickets. Helpless, with the pathetically perfunctory manner long grown familiar to him he gives the child some soothing medicine for her tiny charge’s bronchial trouble and enters another case of “bronchitis” upon the register. “And if it wasn’t bronchitis, ’twould be something else, and death soon, anyhow,” he says. Death does come soon, the white symbol of its presence hangs upon the street door of the crowded tenement, and to the long death-roll of the nation another victim of bronchitis is added—one of the eleven thousand so registered under five years of age. The record gives no hint that back of the bronchitis was rickets and back of the rickets poverty and hunger. But the doctor knows—he knows that little Tad’s case is typical of thousands who are statistically recorded as dying from bronchitis or some other specific disease when the real cause, the inducing cause of the disease, is malnutrition. Even as the Great White Plague recruits its victims from the haunts of poverty, so bronchitis preys there and gathers most of its victims from the ranks of the children whose lives are spent either in the foul and stuffy atmosphere of overcrowded and ill-ventilated homes, or on the streets, underfed, imperfectly clad, and exposed to all sorts of weather.