The Physical Welfare Committee of New York City

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 7, 1909

The Physical Welfare Committee of New York City

INVESTIGATION into the condition of the health of schoolchildren, and providing care for them, is only one of the activities of the physical welfare committee, which, since its organization, has set briskly to work to inquire into the physical conditions of the schoolchildren of the city, and to do what it can to better those conditions by trying to secure proper physical conditions for the child while at school, and to secure proper treatment for children in need of medical care, either from their parents or from free clinics. The committee was active in securing the school census, has been hard at work to get an increased appropriation for visiting nurses and medical inspectors, and has done important work in investigating into the home conditions of children reported by the board of health to be in need of medical, dental, or ocular care, and better nourishment. Investigative work being a slow process, if it is of any value, the results of the inquiries of the committee are just beginning to show.

The statement that a large percentage of New York schoolchildren come to school without any breakfast, which stirred up so much discussion about two years ago, has been kept in mind by the committee’s investigators. They have found that out of fourteen thousand cases examined, one per cent of children go to school breakfastless for the reason that they have no desire to eat, rather than that there is nothing for them to make a breakfast of. This fact is accounted for by the conditions under which many of the tenement children sleep,—bad, close, and dirty surroundings, which do not tend to stimulate appetite. Only twelve per cent had a reasonable breakfast of milk and bread, seventy-six per cent using tea and coffee for breakfast, twelve per cent using those beverages three times a day, and more than twice that percentage using tea or coffee at two meals during the day. Four per cent stated that they had no meat or eggs in their home diet.

The Americans showed the highest number of ailments to each child, being nearly twice as many as that of the Italian. The mothers questioned stated that only three per cent of the children have less than nine hours’ sleep, in spite of the noisy surroundings of the tenements, a statement that, if reliable, contradicts the rather general impression that many of the children in the crowded districts get much less sleep than is good for them. The Germans were found to have the largest percentage of mothers working to make up the family income, and, consequently, having in some degree to neglect the care of their children, the Americans coming next, then the Italian, and last, the Jew.

Of the total number of families investigated by the committee, sixty-three per cent reported that they had a family physician, and twenty-eight per cent that they are treated at a dispensary. Only twenty-four per cent out of them all reported that they had ever employed a dentist for any person in the family, a patent enough comment on the need of some outside influence to persuade the children of these families to care for their teeth.

The committee on physical welfare will not stop with providing free dental clinics for the schoolchildren, but will attempt to secure instruction on how to care for the teeth and prevent disease from creeping in. To some lookers-on, this care of the teeth of schoolchildren seems an unnecessary detail; but when one understands the important relation between good teeth and good health, that bad teeth invite infection, and that nowhere do contagious diseases and epidemics spread so rapidly as among schoolchildren, the precaution is seen to have a real significance for the public welfare.—Brooklyn Eagle.