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state of knowledge, however, should such cases occur it is most
desirable to apply suitable measures of disinfection, and to secure, so
far as possible, the isolation of the sick from the healthy.
EDUCATION AND MEDICAL INSPECTION OF
SCHOLARS,
The hygienic reform of the future will depend almost entirely for
its success on the proper education of the people. We are all too
painfully aware of the large amount of wasted energy and life which
results from ignorance and neglect of the laws of health, and which,
apart from the misery it entails,, constitutes itself such a heavy
economical loss to the State; and there can be no gainsaying that the
ignorance among the poor of household management and of the
elementary principles of hygiene, is responsible in 110 small measure for
their high preventable mortality, their poor physique, their intemperance
and their poverty. The possession of citizens of good moral and
physical stamina is the most valuable and abiding of all national
assets, and for this the nation is largely dependent upon what the
educational influences of school life are made to be. Despite overcrowding
and structural defects in so many of the tenements occupied
by the poor, if those who occupied them had only been trained to
observe cleanly habits and to recognise the importance of fresh air,
how enormously these people would benefit! There is much to be said
against the negative results of an education in which girls are largely
separated from domestic influences and experience during the most
impressionable years of life, and there is no doubt that the elementary
facts of cooking and of infant management and feeding should be
taught to every female child. The feeble efforts in these directions
which have already been made have mostly failed on account of the
unreality and incompetence of the teaching.
If much preventable disease is to be prevented, and if easilycurable
conditions which determine so much the physical and mental
well-being of the individual in after years are to be nipped in the bud,
we must have medical inspection of all scholars at the commencement
of their school career and repeated medical inspection during the