Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/333

Rh the light of experience. In other words, Ellis Island is peculiarly adapted to be an experimental station in the mental and physical examination of immigrants. There is a tremendous need for such a station. The entire subject is new and, as has been pointed out, there is neither precedent nor experience to guide. It is a sophistical and beclouding argument that such work would be an injustice to the immigrant. In the strictest sense it would be an intensive study of the immigrant under the best possible surroundings to find out the best way of separating the sound and desirable alien from the unsound and undesirable.

Such work would find many definite problems in the diagnosis of disease. An instance in point is trachoma. Probably no better trachoma clinic exists in the country than at the Ellis Island hospital. So far the cause of the disease is unknown. Investigation of the etiology would naturally carry with it investigation of the best means of treatment and cure. Mention has been made of the importance of the hookworm and of its prevalence in the United States. There is a mighty host of intestinal parasites, several of which are fully as dangerous as the hookworm though not distributed so widely. An example of this is the fishworm, the Bothriocephalus latus. To exclude immigrants harboring these dangerous intestinal parasites or to cure them before they enter the country is very important.

Dr. M. W. Glover has noted that of 1,553 immigrants examined at San Francisco, 42.8 per cent, harbored the hookworm, not to mention numerous other parasites. He found that 29.4 per cent, of the 782 Chinese examined were infected, and notes the fact that the most marked evidences of infection were seen in Chinese boys. Dr. Glover makes the interesting suggestion that this apparently explains the puzzling observation of the discrepancy between the apparent age and the age claimed in many Chinese boys. In the fiscal year 1912, 941 cases were certified at Ellis Island for lack of physical development, in addition to 444 cases for poor muscular development and 36 for malnutrition. A large proportion of these cases were boys whose physical development did not correspond to the age claimed. Dr. Friedman notes such a disproportion as of common occurrence in the Mediterranean races and especially in the Greeks. It would be well worth while to institute an investigation to determine whether intestinal parasites or some other agency is responsible for these cases. The determination of this point would not only serve to clarify and give a more exact standard of diagnosis and certification of these aliens, but it would be of untold value in relieving similar conditions not only among our own people, but in the countries from which this class of immigrants comes.

The detection and diagnosis of mental conditions in immigrants is a matter of exceeding difficulty. This is in no small measure due to