Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/35

 uses every opportunity to help them to improve their physical condition.

Many people from birth to old age are content with being only half well because they have never known anything better. The eleven-year-old brother of a man in the service had walked on crutches all his life until one morning in the spring of 1917 he broke them. The family did not have enough money to replace them and asked the Red Cross for assistance. The Home Service worker took the boy to a physician. The doctor recommended an operation, which was performed, and now the little fellow is able to run about like other children and needs no crutches.

"She plays too hard," the mother of a girl who constantly complained of tired feet told the Home Service worker. The young woman from the Red Cross, however, took the child to a specialist in diseases of the joints and discovered that a certain kind of shoe would correct the trouble. This shoe was obtained and now the child plays all day without becoming tired.

The Home Service worker makes constant use of physicians and nurses. When, for example, she thinks that any member of a family may have tuberculosis she immediately arranges for an examination by a doctor or at a tuberculosis dispensary if there is one in town. She helps the patient to obtain admission to a sanatorium, or, if that is not possible, she tries to arrange to have a nurse visit the home regularly and supervise the treatment for this disease—a treatment which, as everybody knows, consists of rest, fresh air, good food, and, for the protection of others, the careful destruction of all discharges from the patient's nose and throat.