Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/613

Rh that special and unremitting attention is necessary to minimize the dangers of such incorrect postures. Asymmetrical growth can not be avoided except by a frequent change of muscular tension. Tools and materials must not be pressed against the breast. Ventilation is more important in the shop than in the class room. Sand-paper and injurious colorings should be used as little as possible.

Drawing teachers likewise are now fully cognizant that there are hygienic aspects of their work which can not be safely neglected. For example, the necessity of avoiding accuracy of detail as an aim in the lower grades of instruction, the use of sharp-pointed pencils, intricate models, trying color contrasts, poisonous coloring ingredients, crosslined paper, etc.

Although all the above requirements and others relating to the internal hygiene of the domestic arts are of extremely great importance and suffer frequent neglect, it is the purpose of this paper to point out some of the larger and more positive relations of the manual arts to national health.

The problem of vitality underlies almost every social and political situation confronting us. We are becoming acutely conscious of the possibilities of conservation in the line of health and efficiency. Professor Irving Fisher estimates that of the one and one half million deaths occurring annually in the United States at least six hundred and thirty thousand are due to preventable causes. He computes that the economic loss from these postponable deaths is more than one billion dollars every year. Preventable illnesses are still more numerous and are accountable for the waste of almost another billion per year. The running expenses of tuberculosis alone are sufficient to support six hundred Stanford universities, or three fourths of all the common schools in the United States. Typhoid fever robs us of half as much as tuberculosis. Infant mortality, despite all the advances of preventive medicine, has not appreciably decreased in thirty years. In the most civilized countries from fifteen to twenty-five per cent, of the children do not live to the age of one year, mostly because of parental ignorance and the neglect of a few simple hygienic measures. If our present stock of knowledge pertaining to health prophylaxis were made universally effective the average length of human life would be immediately increased by not less than sixteen years. Certain diseases we know are even now on the wane and the spread of some others has been checked, but the ravages of a few seem to derive impetus from the unnatural strains and conditions of civilized life. Among the latter are, first of all, the nervous disorders of insanity, hysteria and neurasthenia, and, until a few decades ago, the two most wide-spread and terrible plagues of recent centuries, tuberculosis and syphilis.

It is not contended that the physical salvation of the nation is to be