Louis set me thinking and opened my mind to many things. Miss Brewster and I decided to keep memoranda of the children we encountered who had been excluded from school for medical reasons, and later our enlarged staff of nurses became equally interested in obtaining data regarding them. When one of the nurses found a small boy attending school while desquamating from scarlet fever, and, Tom Sawyer-like, pulling off the skin to startle his little classmates, we exhibited him to the President of the Department of Health, and I then learned that the possibility of having physicians inspect the school children was under discussion, and that such evidence of its need as we could produce would be helpful in securing an appropriation for this purpose. I had come to the conclusion that the nurse would be an essential factor in making effective whatever treatment might be suggested for the pupils, and, following an observation of mine to this effect, the president asked me to take part, as nurse, in the medical supervision in the schools. This offer it did not seem wise to accept. We were embarking upon ventures of our own which would require all our faculties and all our strength. It seemed better to be free from connections which would make demand upon our energies for routine work outside the settlement. Moreover, the time did not seem ripe for advocating the introduction of both the doctor and the nurse. The doctor himself, in this capacity, was an innovation. The appointment of a nurse would have been a radical departure. [Illustration] In 1897 the Department of Health appointed the first doctors; one hundred and fifty were assigned to the schools for one hour a day at a salary of $30 a month. They were expected to examine for contagious diseases and to send out of the classrooms all those who showed suspicious symptoms. It proved to be a perfunctory service and only superficially touched the needs of the children. In 1902, when a reform administration came into power, the medical staff was reduced and the salary increased to $100 a month, while three hours a day were demanded from the doctors. The Health Commissioner of that administration, an intelligent friend of children, now ordered an examination of all the public school pupils, and New York was horrified to learn of the prevalence of trachoma. Thousands of children were sent out of the schools because of this infectious eye trouble, and in our neighborhood we watched many of them, after school hours, playing with the children for whose protection they had been excluded from the classrooms. Few received treatment, and it followed that truancy was encouraged, and, where medical inspection was most thorough, the classrooms were depleted.