The Health bulletin [serial] - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

April, 1927 The Health Bulletin 9
begins to note such symptoms as the
foregoing there will be no time lost in
consulting with a good physician. The
physician will make a very careful examination,
including urinalysis, and
this will be repeated several times at
frequent intervals until the trouble is
located and the child started well on
the road to recovery. The child, and for
that matter the adult, who comes to
breakfast each morning with a smile,
and as an evidence of good health, partakes
of a good square meal, need not
bother about the height and weight
charts.
Parents should be especially watchful
of their children following any
acute disease no matter how mild or
how seemingly trivial such attacks may
appear. One of the chief dangers of
such diseases as measles, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, diphtheria and other
diseases, are the complications sometimes
following. Mastoiditis, a dangerous
ear disease, frequently requiring a
serious operation, often follows diphtheria.
It may be several weeks after
the child is
apparently well before the
mastoiditis develops. Sometimes following
an attack of septic sore throat.
Nephritis or Bright's disease, may follow
as a complication. This may hap-
I)en two or three weeks or more after
the throat symptoms have subsided. The
first suspicion the parents may have
that anything is wrong with the child
may be the appearance of blood in the
urine. It is always a serious complication
and requires absolute rest in bed
under the care of a good physician.
The alert parent should be constantly
on the lookout for beginning symptoms
of contagious disease. He should watch
for ear, eye, throat or teeth troubles.
Finally the child's mental health and
habits should receive very careful consideration.
Any slight deviation from
normal hahits of thought and speech
should be sufficient to demand most
thorough attention. The growing child
should be developing strength of character,
and sympathetic treatment at the
hands of the parents often means much
in this important particular ; and may
be the means of preventing regrets later
on in life.
A PATENT MEDICINE TESTIMONIAL
All of us know that the most effective
advertising is through the personal
testimonial route, especially where the
testimonial is accompanied by the
photograph of a fairly good looking
young man or a pretty girl.
There is a certain patent medicine
concern, located in another state, that
has probably taken more good hard
money out of North Carolina during
the last ten or fifteen years than any
other similar agency. This concern has
sold its product by the car load in
North Carolina. The pull in the stuff
js that it has a very high alcoholic content
and when a fellow takes one bottle
he is just almost bound to have another
right away, and so on. This particular
concern has specialized in its advertising
matter in at least one of the big
morning daily papers of the State, and
perhaps all of them, publishing a series
of testimonials with pictures. A reader
of this big morning daily just mentioned
writes us from Cherokee County,
North Carolina, attaching a clipping of
the advertisement in which the picture
of a man, with a military cap on, is
presented along with his peroration
concerning the magic properties of this
particular fake. In this case what
shocked the reader in Cherokee County
was the fact that in this particular
instance the testimonial was from a
man who advertised himself as having
been assistant city health officer for ten
years in the largest city of western
North Carolina. The writer makes the
statement to the effect : "What is the
use ! If health officers and assistant
health officers and the employees of
health departments, State, county, and
city, which should know better than
anybody else the fallacy of messing
with such stuff, are not only addicted
to the habit of consuming this stuff
but are willing to put their pictures in
the papers and advertise to the world
their practice, how could the general
public be expected to listen to statements
of fact by responsible health department
publications concerning such