“Heaven forgive you! Why, see here, Clyde, your dodo of a superintendent talks of keeping sickness out of the schools. Doesn’t that mean keeping sickness out of the pupils? There’s just one way to do that: get every child into the best possible condition of repair—eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, stomach, everything, and maintain them in that state. Then disease will have a hard time breaking down the natural resistance of the system. Damaged organs in a child are like flaws in a ship’s armor-plate; a vital weakening of the defenses. And remember, the child is always battling against one besieging germ or another.” “Why can’t medical science wipe out the germs?” demanded Mrs. Sharpless. “It’s always claiming to do such wonders.” “In a few instances it can. In typhoid we fight and win the battle from the outside by doing that very thing. In smallpox, and to a lesser extent in diphtheria, we can build up an effective artificial barrier by inoculation. But, as medical men are now coming to realize, in the other important contagions of childhood, measles, whooping-cough, and scarlet fever, we must fight the disease from inside the individual; that is, make as nearly impregnable as possible the natural fortifications of the body to resist and repel the invasion. That is what school medical inspection aims at.” “You wouldn’t rank whooping-cough and measles with scarlet fever, would you?” said Mrs. Sharpless incredulously. “Why not? Although scarlet fever has the worst after-effects,—though not much more serious than those of measles,—the three are almost equal so far as the death-rate is concerned.” “Surely not!” protested the old lady. “Why, I’d rather have measles in the house ten times, or whooping-cough either, than scarlet fever once.” “You’re about ten times as likely to have.” She looked puzzled. “But what did you mean by saying that one of ‘em is as bad as the other?” “That it’s as dangerous to the community, though not to the individual.” “Just a little deep for me, too,” confessed Mr. Clyde. “Yet it’s perfectly simple. Here, take an example. Would you rather be bitten by a rattlesnake or a mosquito?” “A mosquito, of course.” “Naturally. Yet a rattlesnake country is a good deal safer than a mosquito country. You wouldn’t hesitate, on account of your health, to move to Arizona, where rattlesnakes live?” “I suppose not.” “But you _would_ be afraid to establish your family in the malarious swamps of the South?” “Certainly.”