Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/327

Rh reach with our own publications, we have asked the newspapers of the state to cooperate with us, and have met with generous response. We send out each week a 500-word health hint on such topics as Infant Feeding, Hot Weather Hygiene, Health on the Farm, County Hospitals and Taxes, Cancer a Preventable Disease, and the like. The "Hints" are mailed in proof or in electrotype, as desired, and over 400 daily and weekly papers are using them each week throughout the state. We estimate that by this means we are reaching a million and a half of readers.

The printed page must be supplemented by a more striking and vivid appeal to the eye, and the popular exhibit should form a part of any well-organised public health campaign. The work of the New York State Department during the summer was centered particularly upon the prevention of infant mortality, and to aid in this campaign we prepared three child-welfare exhibits, which between April and July were shown in twenty-five counties of the state. These exhibits led in many cases to the establishment of infant welfare stations and in every community through which the exhibits passed there has been left a trail of enthusiastic and constructive infant-welfare work. During the fall, these infant-welfare exhibits and others dealing with rural hygiene have been shown at forty county fairs throughout the state. The Department arranges for lectures upon health topics whenever requested, and the members of the staff as well as the sanitary supervisors are kept busy filling engagements of this kind. Three special lecturers on diseases of the eye and ear, on mouth hygiene and the care of the teeth, and on social hygiene are attached to the department and we plan during the coming winter to prepare and print a series of syllabi of lectures on all the more important public health topics, with a set of lantern slides corresponding to each lecture which may be sent out on request for the use of health officers and other local lectures. Original moving picture films dealing with infant-welfare work and rural hygiene are now being prepared for use.

I have dwelt somewhat in detail upon the public education work of the New York State Department of Health merely as a type of what many progressive state departments, like Virginia and North Carolina, and city departments, like Chicago, are carrying forward. The work of the Life Extension Institute is full of promise of a more direct and personal type of education under private auspices, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company is doing a splendid work in diffusing the principles of public health, not only among its own policyholders, but in the community at large.

One of the next tasks of the future, as it seems to me, is to add to the training of the public in the elements of hygiene and sanitation some plan of organization which shall make our health militia effective