Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/328

324 for all forms of necessary common action. We have in New York state, a corps of district sanitary supervisors, who form a link between the State Department of Health and the local health officer, bringing to the latter the expert knowledge and the moral support of the whole state. We have a State Sanitary Officers' Association, which is now being organized in county branches. Beyond the health officers, we want the leaders of the public to be informed as to local health needs and ready to move effectively to meet them. If each city and town and rural county had a group of public-spirited citizens organized to seek out and solve the more pressing problems of their particular locality, and to support the local and state authorities in the general conduct of the public health campaign, progress could be made by leaps and bounds. To-day we find in many a city an anti-tuberculosis association, a milk committee, a visiting nurse association, an associated charities and various churches' and merchants' associations and other bodies dealing with phases of health work, often working at cross purposes with each other and with the local health department. These forces should be knit together in local health associations like the revolutionary committees of correspondence for community defense against disease. They should be kept in communication with each other and with the most recent current advances in sanitary theory and practise, perhaps by developing them as local branches of the American Public Health Association. Plans are now under way in New York State for the organization of such militia companies. We have thought of many titles. Health Association, Health League, Life Extension League, Life Lengthening League, without finding quite the right one; but the thing itself we are sure we need.

Is it not time that a serious effort was made along some such lines as those I have outlined, to mobilize our people for the public health? The nation that first really accomplishes this task will be so strong, and at the same time so sensitive of the sacredness of human life, that neither the fear of others nor its own aggression will be likely to compel it to mobilize for any less noble cause.



F the terrible engines of destruction that science, the handmaiden of war as well as of peace, has brought to the firing line in this present world conflict, there is none more terrible for offense, more potent for defense, than that war engine supplied by nature—man.

Even the prevision of military experts was at fault as to the line along which modern warfare would be waged. When it was reported