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12
The improvement and re-planning of areas of badly built
houses is referred to elsewhere, as is also the advantages of
a lady health visitor, who elsewhere has been shown to
easily gain the confidence of the poorer mothers, and whose
advice on feeding babies has been followed in Huddersfield
and other places by a most remarkable decline in the infantile
mortality.
I have already referred to school buildings, but I should
like you to bear in mind that 12 square feet of floor space in
all elementary schools is a very modest desideratum.
The further means of preventing the spread of this
disease may be summed up shortly. I should like to see a
free dispensary for tuberculosis where any one feeling out of
sorts might be thoroughly examined and a diagnosis made.
Patients could be given advice on the conduct of their lives,
but should be referred to medical practitioners or charitable
institutions for medicine, &c. Such a dispensary might be
held in the evening twice or thrice a week in some room belonging
to the local authority and a small honorarium to the
medical men doing the work need be the only expense.
Sanatoria ought not to be required in great numbers after
preventive measures have begun to show their efficacy.
They could be arranged at small expense if treatment were
carried out in single huts with buildings of brick and stone
for administration only. A hospital for dying cases would
be for some time necessary as the crowded dwelling rooms of
the poor must aid in spreading the disease amongst the
comparatively healthy living under crowded conditions. Such
persons have rarely strong healthy lungs and break down
easily under a little extra stress.
Special class rooms, or rather open-air shelters, should
be provided in connection with every school for those children
showing a tendency to consumption. This is the open-air
prevention which in time should do away in large measure
with the need for open-air cure in sanatoria for the consumptive
poor.
After school days the most satisfactory means of prevention
would be the establishment of working colonies, such