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

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February, 1927 The Health Bulletin 25
She always interests herself in everything
that concerns her pupils' welfare
and being interested, of course, means
that she gets all the information possible
about each and every child who
travels each year through her grade.
Last year she received at the beginning
of the term a pupil who represented
the third from the same family to come
into her grade. This boy was apparently
healthy and well nourished, in
striking contrast to the two whom she
had previously taught from the same
family. On investigation at the home
of the children in a suburb of Raleigh,
she found that there were seven children
in the family and all of them
with the exception of Thomas, we will
call him, were like the two older
pupils, undernourished, stunted in
growth, nervous and irritable. Thomas
did not look as if he was related to
any of the rest of the children. Our
teacher was of course stumped completely
for an explanation. But the
mother had the answer. She told the
teacher that soon after Thomas was
born they were able to get a good cow,
and kept the cow until Thomas was
two years old. She said Thomas liked
milk and had all he wanted and drank
lots of it until he was two years old.
They had never before been able to own
a cow, and had not since. So Thomas
was the only one of the seven to have
proper nourishment when he needed it
most. Lucky Thomas. Tlie family
were too poor to purchase milk for all
the children and of course not able to
keep up a cow of their own.
The consequence for that family.
Tragedy, grim, stark tragedy. Six children
deprived of the right every child
should have, plenty of milk ; bone and
blood and teeth and muscle and nerve
builder, until too late to lay the foundation
for enduring health. The children
will suffer, the family will suffer, the
community will suffer.
Sometime we hope somebody will
write a book on the proper application
of the Parable of the Loaves and
Fishes. Economic ills and the results
of ignorance are just as acute in North
Carolina today as they were in Palistine
nineteen hundred years ago when
the Master fed the hungry multitude.
EFFECTS OF NUTRITION ON GROWTH A2fD RESISTANCE
TO INFECTION
For a number of years, ixud especially
since the discovery of the role played
by vitamins in nutrition, there has been
a tendency to attribute every ill of
mankind to a deficient or faulty diet.
No one questions the importance of a
proper diet, yet here and there we
find researches which tend to throw
doubt upon the extreme views which
have been put forward by certain socalled
nutrition experts.
A most careful and exhaustive study
has recently been published by the
Medical Research Council of England,
which throws considerable doubt on
matters which have been accepted as
almost axiomatic. From 1919 to 1923
an investigation of the poorer classes
in the three largest cities in Scotland,
and of laborers and miners of the rural
districts
of the same country, was carried
out. It has been shown previously
that city dwellers are on the average
shorter and lighter than country people,
and the cause of this difference has
been widely attributed to a deficient
supply of suitable food. The workers
expected to find a close correlation between
the nutrition of a child and the
income of the family, expressed as per
person, but have not been able to show
this. The argument that an increase
of wages would of itself lead to better
growth is not supported by their findings.
The effect of overcrowding with
consequent decrease of air-space per
person was also found to be insignificant,
though the investigators point out
that their failure to establish such a
correlation does not exclude the possibility
of such connection and may
only mean that some other factors are
dominant. One factor of this kind was
found to be "maternal efficiency," and
this again was found to depend, at least
to some extent, upon air-space per person,
but also upon the size of the
family, i. e., overcrowding. Overcrowded
dwellings and an inferior type
of mothers were found to go hand in