Is it not significant that America's national movement is due primarily to the organizing capacity of laymen in the New York Charity Organization Society rather than to schools or hospitals? Most of the local secretaries are men whose inspiration came from contact with the non-medical relief of the poor in city tenements. The secretary of the national association is a university professor of anthropology, who has also a medical degree. The child victim's plea--Little Jo's Smile--was nationalized by an association of laymen, aided by the advertising managers of forty magazines. The smaller cities of New York state are being aroused by a state voluntary association that for years has visited almshouses, insane asylums, and hospitals. These facts I emphasize, for they illustrate the opportunity and the duty of the lay educator, whether parent, teacher, labor leader, or trustee of hospital, orphanage, or relief society.
Three fundamental rules of action should be established as firmly as religious principles:
1. The public health authorities should be told of every known and every suspected case of tuberculosis.
2. For each case proved by examination of sputum to be tuberculous, the public-health officers should know that the germs are destroyed before being allowed to contaminate air or food.
3. Sick and not yet sick should practice habits of health that build up vitality to resist the tubercle bacilli and that abhor uncleanliness as nature abhors a vacuum.
[Illustration: FIGHTING TUBERCULOSIS WITH A NATIONAL ORGANIZATION]
All laws, customs, and environmental conditions opposed to the enforcement of these three principles must be modified or abolished. If the teachers of America will list for educational use in their own communities the local obstacles to these rules of action, they will see exactly where their local problem lies. The illustrations that are given in this book show in how many ways these rules of action are now being universalized. Three or four important steps deserve especial comment:
1. Compulsory notification of all tuberculous cases.
2. Compulsory removal to hospital of those not able at home to destroy the bacilli, or compulsory supervision of home care.