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State board of health and other helpful agencies. These men are invited to attend the local and county meetings and make addresses on tuberculosis, typhoid, hookworm, and other preventable diseases. Local physicians and county health officers are also invited to visit. schools and make inspections and give instructions.

4. General improvement.-Marked improvement is reported in at least 1,500 schools in water supply, ventilation, prevention of dust, lighting, heating, and building and care of outhouses. It is very common to find the floors of rural schools oiled, the furniture and walls cleaned with sanitary dust clothes, outhouses built and kept in good condition, window sashes and shades arranged for ventilation and correct lighting, and the people generally awaking to the importance of better health conditions in the home and school.

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D. MUSEUM COOPERATION IN THE TEACHING OF HYGIENE AND
SANITATION.

C. E. A. WINSLOW,

American Museum of Natural History, New York, N. Y.

In the hall of public health of the American Museum of Natural History we have now, after three years' work, installed three fairly complete series of exhibits dealing with water supply and public health, with the disposal of city wastes and with bacteria, while a fourth series, illustrating the relation of insects to disease, is well under way.

The relation of insects to disease is a particularly fruitful field for museum work and is the one upon which we are chiefly engaged at the present time. The American Museum already has in its department of invertebrate zoology wonderful enlarged models of mosquitoes, and the department of health has just installed a model of the house fly, enlarged 40 diameters, which took a skilled artist modeler nearly a year to complete. A wide series of facts bearing on the life history of the fly are illustrated, as well as the relation of the fly to disease, the practical methods for its control, and the results achieved. thereby. A similar, but more enlarged model of the flea (carrier of bubonic plague) is now under preparation, and we have already installed models, some small and some life-size, dealing with the rats which harbor the plague microbe and from which the flea carries it to man. The opportunity for future development here, and in connection with the mosquitoes of malaria and yellow fever, and a score of other disease carriers, is a tempting one which we hope to develop in the next few years.

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This hall is our first opportunity to serve the public schools in the work of health education. The teachers bring their classes to the museum in one of the periods allotted to civic biology, and in an hour with these models and diagram the pupils learn more than they could get from books and lectures in a month.

In addition to the hall, which is open to all the visitors to the museum (numbering 800,000 a year), we arrange special lectures to the school children on the occasion of their visits. It is the policy of the museum to provide lectures (generally illustrated) on any subject within the field for any teacher who may ask it and for any number of pupils, from a score to a thousand. Or, if the teacher prefers to lecture himself, we provide hall, lantern slides, and operator. The larger high schools send their classes twice a year near the end of each term for a talk on water, milk, insect-borne disease, city cleaning, or some other topic which fits into their course.

For some time the American Museum has taken an active part in the nature-study work of the public schools by circulating loan collection of birds, insects, mollusks, sponges, corals, woods, minerals, and the like. At the instance of some of the high-school teachers most active in civic biology, we have applied this same plan to our publichealth extension work. Our first attempt was in the form of an album of large photographs dealing with the spread and prevention of communicable diseases.

During the past half year, these albums went to 10 high schools and 22 elementary schools in the city, and were used by 52,610 children. The general method pursued by the teacher is to go over them pretty thoroughly in the higher grades, and then to bring them into the general assembly hall, where a talk is given upon them and where they are often left for inspection for a considerable period. The time for which one of the albums is kept in a school varies from eight weeks to four months, and one distributing agent reports that once a teacher gets an album, she will not release it until her children have seen it several times, and until the other children in the school have seen it."

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All this is, of course, only a beginning of what we hope to do, even for the high schools. We have as yet scarcely touched the great underlying problem of the elementary schools, where it is most vital that a sound basis should be laid for healthy living and where at present (in New York City) 15 minutes a week is the maximum time that can be spared for theoretical instruction in hygiene. We do feel, however, that we have done enough to show that museum methods of instruction may be made of use in the teaching of school hygiene and sanitation.

E. AN EXPERIMENT IN STUDENT CONTROL OF SCHOOL SANITATION AND HYGIENE.

G. W. HUNTER,

De Witt Clinton High School, New York, N. Y.

The great elementary and secondary schools of New York City form excellent experimental ground for much-needed cooperation between pupils, teachers, and civic authorities to obtain safe and sanitary conditions of life during the time that the persons involved are in the school buildings. The city may supply the plant, sanitary and well equipped; it may safeguard the water and food supplies furnished to pupils; and it may send teachers into the work temperamentally and scientifically fitted to do the work of instruction for sane and sanitary living; but if the student body does not cooperate with the teaching staff and the civic helpers outside the school, then the school building and its surroundings will be as hopelessly insanitary as if the message of the individual drinking cup and the individual towel had never been preached.

An attempt to obtain cooperation has been made in the De Witt Clinton High School. This school, one of the largest boys' schools in the United States, is ideal for such an experiment because of its peculiar environment and its cosmopolitan clientele. The building, a splendid example of modern school architecture, is located on the border of one of the most unsavory localities of the city, an area where the gang element in its worst form runs riot, and where race battles are not uncommon even in broad daylight. The streets near by are offensive and ill-kept, the one redeeming feature being the close proximity of the school to two large hospitals. The school building is used day and night throughout practically all the year, housing a great day school, a night school, and a lecture and recreation center. Probably 5,000 persons daily enter its doors. Of the student body. over 75 per cent are foreign born, in most cases the migration having been very recent. Most of the boys, especially the "eastsiders," are well behaved and anxious to learn, but have never had an opportunity in their home surroundings to know what real sanitary and hygienic conditions are. Consequently, in spite of watchful teachers and efficient janitoral staff, the halls, rooms, and in particular the stairways and lunch room, often presented an appearance that was far from sanitary.

Each half year in September and again in February, nearly 800 new pupils, fresh from the many schools of the various parts of the city, each with their own standards, enter the portals of the school. It was from these entering classes, aliens, without any idea of what the school and its activities stood for, that we experienced the most

difficulty. No conventions bound them, school traditions were as yet unknown, and the preaching of their teachers and the practical work of their biological and hygiene training had not yet begun to bear fruit. A trail of torn papers, chalk dust, and cast-off luncheon came to follow certain of these first-term classes.

Then came the thought: If these boys are unwittingly the offenders against the decency and self-respect of the school, why not make them sow the first fruits of a propaganda against this lack of consideration of others? Calling together half a dozen of the better element from among the incomers, a plan was evolved, the details of which follow. Boys in the school for convenience in distribution are grouped in sections of about 35 pupils, each section being assigned to a given home room in charge of a single teacher who acts as their advisor, and to whom they recite in one subject. In this home room the section has most of its study periods; there they discuss the affairs which are solely section matters; and activities of various sorts are organized there. Whatever esprit de corps the section possesses arises in their home room from the fellowship aroused by meeting together in the morning or after school. Here was evidently the place to strike first; so notice was sent out of a meeting to which each first and second term section was asked to send delegates. These delegates became the nucleus of what was later known as the Sanitary Squad of the De Witt Clinton High School.

At this juncture we evoked the aid of Mr. Reuben Simons, of the department of street cleaning. This gentleman had done work of a similar nature among much younger boys in the elementary schools, and knowing boy nature, came forward with the offer of badges, to be used by the squad members as a distinctive mark of authority. Committees were then formed, officers elected, and the work of the organization began. An executive committee, an improvement committee, the duty of which was to suggest improvements in and about the building, a street committee to police the streets during the lunch periods, a hall committee, whose members policed the halls at all hours of the day and brought offenders against law and order to justice, a lunch-room committee, whose onerous task was to "clean up "the lunch room, and finally a social committee, whose business it was to provide the programs for the meetings held every Tuesday afternoon. The officers of the club were a president, vice president, secretary (for there were no dues), and a faculty director. These officers made up an executive council, and in reality directed the interests of the squad in the right directions.

One of the first useful activities of the squad was to draw up and have printed a set of suggested rules of conduct. These printed notices were posted in every room in the school building and on all bulletin boards in the halls and lunch room. Then, with the aid of

large stencils, signs were printed, which were placed in the lunch room and in the halls. These signs reminded the students that the cost of the lunch furnished depended in the long run upon cooperation. between school authorities and the student body.

The work of the squad was at first directed toward bettering the conditions in the lunch room, where over 2,500 boys were fed almost every school day. Then, widening their circle of influence, they took charge of the halls and rooms all over the building, and finally the condition of the streets adjacent to the school was taken in hand. During the recent spring "clean-up" campaign waged by the civic authorities, the boys personally took charge of the distribution of circulars in localities that they could cover. Several large meetings were held to advertise the reasons for this campaign. The last meeting was held in the auditorium of the school and attended by over 1,500 boys. This last meeting was addressed by Dr. MacMillan, the director in charge of the clean-up campaign for the city.

But the work of the squad was by no means all plain sailing. Not all boys who joined the squad proved to be trustworthy, for it was a hard matter for a 13-year-old boy to see the ethics of picking up another fellow's leavings. Sometimes open rebellion on the part of the boys who were required to do clean-up work by squad members made matters rather difficult for the director to untangle. Boys of the upper classes, who were at times careless, like all other young men, resented being asked by a freshman to clean up anything, even if they did cause the trouble. So a "strong-arm squad" came as a natural evolution from work in the lunch room where conditions were unusually trying.

On this squad only large boys with a fair amount of tact were allowed to serve, and it was considered to be an especial honor to attain this position. The usual method of procedure on the part of a squad member who saw a schoolmate throw something on the floor was to ask him to pick it up. If he refused, he would show him his squad badge and again make the request. If this did not bring the required response, the squad member would take the name of the boy and report him to meet the director at the court held every afternoon. Sometimes the getting of the offender's name would be difficult task and might mean trailing the boy to a recitation room, where a teacher would require the name to be given. Every afternoon in the office of the director court is held. The director occupies the chair, the assistant director acting as the prosecuting attorney. The case is first stated against the reported offender, then he is allowed to make his defense, witnesses are called for the prosecution to rebut any false statements that the prisoner may have made, and finally the director pronounces sentence. This may merely consist in a reprimand with an invitation to attend the next meeting of the

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