umbers 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.

Much of the care exercised at school to prevent children's diseases is
counteracted because children are exposed at home and in public places
to contagion, where ignorance more often than carelessness is the cause
of uncleanliness. By hygien