you that I am simply in the beginning of the study of this field of education, and while deeply interested, do not mean to take the position, in any way, of feeling that my way is better than that of anybody else, but it seems to me that there are certain dangers, certain difficulties, and certain very important reforms, which should be instituted.

A LADY: In the rules and regulations of the Board of Education of San Francisco, there is one that says that the windows shall be lowered at the top, and never raised at the bottom. I scarcely found a room but what I was happy to escape from. The condition was so that I was glad to get out.

DR. W. LEMOYNE WILLS: I can hardly agree with Dr. Wood in his remarks about better methods of teaching hygiene in the public schools. In a very humble way I am a teacher of medical students, and have some knowledge of the methods pursued in the public high schools, and they have no facilities whatever. The teacher, while he has other things to do, has no material, and about once a year he goes and borrows a skeleton or a book of plates, and possibly dissects a cat or a rabbit, and calls that teaching physiology. Now, in the public school it is considered indelicate to teach anatomy or physiology as medical students study it, or as anybody else studies such a subject intelligibly; and the curse of the present day in the public schools is these cursed school books published by the State. They have at least crushed out the book monopoly and the book debauchery of school boards, but they have perpetrated upon the public school system a set of books that are neither one thing nor the other, and they have about six instead of one. These are published by the State, at Sacramento-good, bad, and indifferent. Take the book on physiology. I recollect Dr. Washington Ayer said two years ago, in discussing this matter before the State Medical Society committee, that when asked to correct and revise it, he offered to write a new book rather than correct the one that he was asked to review. We, as medical men, and this convention can do a great deal to bring the people to look upon this thing as they should, and demand that the State shall either publish better books or throw the subject open to competition of the writers of the best books in the country and the best publishers. California has done a great deal to stop this schoolring monopoly and debauchery, as I have said, but they have fastened on the State schools a worse curse, and that is worthless school books. DR. SAMUEL O. L. POTTER: My experience as a teacher and examiner of gentlemen who, in medical colleges, have been school teachers themselves, may not be out of place here. I would abolish the whole subject from the public schools. I do not see what good it is doing. Its practical result is, to give the children and older pupils a smattering of what, among other subjects, is worse than ignorance. We all remember the old saying, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." It is peculiarly adapted to the public schools, I think, in the State of California. For years I have examined school teachers who have come to the medical college, and I tell you that not one in a hundred of them can spell, read, or write, or speak the English language correctly. The penmanship of these gentlemen who have been teachers themselves is such that when as an examiner, like Dr. Wood, there, I had every year two or three hundred of their final examination papers, it was a labor of the most onerous character to even try to decipher what was put before When the teachers are so, what can you expect of the pupils. The

us.

whole tendency of popular education in our public schools is to ignore the foundation; to ignore the three R's, and to expect that by some miraculous effort, or intuition, pupils will get all that before they get to the public school; and they get a little astronomy, and a little anatomy, and a little hygiene, and a little mathematics, and a little chemistry, and a little of this, that, and the other, and they go out into the world thinking they know everything, and they don't know anything. I venture to say you couldn't find a dozen graduates of normal schools in the State of California to-day who could tell you accurately where the heart of a dog is.

HELEN MOORE: I hope even this little smattering will not be left out of the public schools. What we want is a great deal more, and as the gentleman has suggested here, and as Dr. Potter has mentioned, we need specialists in this study. In my experience as a teacher, it was a subject that interested me very much, and I wanted this subject studied very thoroughly, and I found, although I have studied the subject a great deal myself, I was wholly incompetent to teach it. Instead of dismissing it, I got a specialist to give instruction, and I found that in one day devoted to instruction in that subject by a specialist, my class would learn more than in one or two months' study in any other way. Why? Because the teacher was enabled to answer every question that the child would ask, and the result was very satisfactory in every way. Now, we need more and more instruction, and we need specialists, and I hope that when a committee is appointed by this convention to wait upon the Board of Education, they will remember what constitutes a Board of Education. They were appointed two years ago, and yet have so little to report. Then another point comes in-the home. You must remember the child gets a certain amount of instruction in school. Then, again, it must go home, and it goes to an ignorant mother, and if the child is to enjoy the privileges of education, I think the mother should cooperate with the school. Now, if we had among our inspectors what are called lady visitors, or women visitors, such as they have in Glasgow, Scotland, you would find that many of the unhygienic conditions that exist in the home could be corrected, and in that way the home would coöperate with the school. And another thing: Considering the cosmopolitan character of our city, it is absolutely necessary that we must depend upon reaching the home largely through the schools, and I think if it is the sense of this convention that physiology and hygiene should be taught by specialists, and a committee, appointed for that purpose, be appointed to wait upon the Board of Education, and then if they follow up their work, I think that we shall have the pleasure of hearing, at the Fourth Annual Sanitary Convention, a very favorable report on the subject of physiology and hygiene in the public schools.

A LADY: I am afraid I did not make myself heard, but I think this rule of the Board of Education of the city enlarges our death list every year, and I am very much interested in it. It says that the windows shall only be opened at the top and never at the bottom, and the teachers are implicitly obeying the instruction, for I visited for three weeks to find out. I would like the opinion of the convention on that rule. DR. J. R. LAINE: I believe there is something of a misapprehension with reference to a committee that is said to have been appointed a year ago by this convention, concerning the teaching of hygiene in the

public schools. The committee was appointed by the State Medical Society. I have no recollection of seeing the names of a committee appointed by this body, but I know that the matter was discussed and know that such a committee was appointed by the State Medical Society two or three days later in this city. I wish to correct that impression. Now, with reference to ventilating school-houses by windows. I will venture this much: It became part of my duty, about a year ago, to prepare a pamphlet directed to school teachers. In that circular I recommended what is generally recommended by not only the profession, but by architects and sanitarians who are engaged in these matters, that the ventilation should be from the top of the window. I believe the reasons are obvious and plain. The air should be permitted to come in from the top rather than come directly on the backs and necks and faces of children. It is one of those things that ought to appear reasonable without more explanation. The janitor should be disciplined by the Superintendent when teachers prove negligent in that direction. The janitor of the building should be capable of giving teachers instructions on this subject, if necessary.

Now, I, for one, although I am thoroughly in sympathy with the intent and purposes of the paper, and recognize the value of the contribution presented to us this afternoon, yet I do not recognize the present great value of teaching hygiene and physiology in the public schools as it is being done; and yet I have been amazed when going into a grammar school in Sacramento and listening to the recitations. The recitations and answers to the questions have been such as to convince me that the children could answer them better than the physicians. They could give the number of teeth and component parts of the human body with such correctness that I was astonished, and they had been taught by their teachers from text-books. They call that physiology. In addition, they had the usual diatribe concerning the evil of tobacco and the enormities which follow the use of spirituous liquors; all of which, in my opinion, except the bare mention, should have been eliminated from the text-book. I doubt if the profession will take issue with me, when I say that to impress the subject of intemperance upon immature minds, except by precept and example, is altogether wrong. Not that we want to support the liquor dealer, because as a rule the physician is the enemy of the saloonman as much as is the clergyman, if not more so. He sees the evil results of the saloon habit everywhere. The people who spend their money in the rum-room do not usually spend it upon the physician, so it touches him in his pocket, as well as in his sentiment and in his reason. Neither temperance nor chastity should be taught from a text-book. But there must be some theory of instruction in hygiene, and what shall it be? To me there is only one practical plan, and that is by the instruction of the teacher.

I remember reading at one time something concerning the teaching of the English language. Dr. Potter referred to it. The question was asked how to acquire the use of the native tongue in the best way. A school teacher was asked, and he said, "Books, books." But that does not always follow. One may acquire a great deal of knowledge, but not acquire the idiom of a language from books. What then? "Raise a child in a family where nothing but pure language is spoken; let him grow up and hear it and use it in that way, and then he may acquire the habit, and use it from habit." So it is in teaching hygiene. If

the teacher, taking the class from six years of age and carrying it along up from one grade to another, impresses upon those little minds the arts of correct living that mean self-preservation, they will learn hygiene without text-books.

DR. THOS. D. WOOD: I am glad Dr. Laine has brought out the point which he has. The trouble is we teach the children something we think they ought to know, instead of knowing what they really need. With reference to athletics, I have been very much amused, as well as interested, in seeing the attitude of some Eastern medical journals within the last two or three years on the subject of hand-ball and athletic sports. It comes within my duty to help patch up the men who are injured in the various athletic sports, at the same time to assist and try to control, in one of our institutions, these games and various phases of athletics. We forget, as physicians, when we see men injured by the excesses in certain forms of sport, certain fundamental, underlying principles and truths. We forget that it is impossible to abolish the causes of disease by statutory law. We forget that it is impossible to civilize or make the human family go through a process of evolution faster than certain forces allow it. For example, take the athletic sports of to-day; the excesses of various kinds have taken the place, in my mind, of something a great deal worse. They have taken the place of the debauches, the revelries, the ungovernable, uncontrollable expression of brute force and strength of a certain age of college students, and in a way this has been a great advance over the habits of public schools of forty or fifty years ago. Nobody deplores the evils of athletics, perhaps, more than I do. I was thoroughly opposed to a good many phases of them five or six or seven years ago, but we cannot make the world perfect in a day. These things must be governed. One of our best teachers has made the distinction between athletics and gymnastics, that gymnastic work is intended to make stronger the organism of the student. Gymnastic work has passed entirely outside of that. Its purpose is to gain a certain objective end in competition, just as much so as the gaining of money is another object. If it were possible to get the students to theoretically and philosophically do their gymnastic work or their work in manual training and derive organic physical benefit from it, we would all like to see them do it, but not until the playing instinct is civilized out of the young man or young woman-and it gets civilized out too fast in a great many cases-can this be done. Athletics must be controlled. They must be improved in a great many ways, but the minute you abolish athletics you will let in something that is a great deal worse, as the Eastern institutions will find out if they try to do it. Manual training is not synonymous with proper gymnastic training. It would be a satisfaction if a child could learn a useful art and at the same time get proper exercise and training for his bodily needs. Unfortunately the manual training work very frequently emphasizes certain tendencies. which in the child will shorten his life a great deal, and it has been a mistake to try and make manual training do what it is not possible that it can do by the very nature of its work. The gymnastic training should fit the child fundamentally for usefulness in life, and if the gymnastic training is not more important than the manual training directly or indirectly to his usefulness as an industrial factor, as a healthy human being, it must give way at once to that which is immediately and practically more useful.

DR. S. S. HERRICK: I wish to call your attention to Dr. Potter's remarks in regard to the inutility or inadvisability of communicating to young pupils even a small amount of knowledge of hygiene. I think it is about time that we should realize that poetry and truth are rather antagonistic. The more poetry generally the less truth, and the reason which is applied to hygiene would have just as much force if applied to any other branch of learning; just as much force with reference to mathematics and language as to hygiene.

CALIFORNIA AND TUBERCULOSIS.

By D. A. HODGHEAD, M.D.

It has long been a proverb that westward the course of empire takes its way. A casual glance at the history of nations will demonstrate that in a general way from the dawn of history this has been true. The oldest records and the still older traditions place the origin of empires in the far East, thence the march is westward to India, Persia, and Egypt; northward to Greece, westward again to Rome, extending itself over the remainder of Europe to England, and making its final triumphant rally on this western continent. This advance has represented not only the onward trend of individuals and masses, but it has been coëxistent with progress, with greatness, with intellectual development.

We of California may, with entire naturalness and consistency, be disposed to apply this rule not only to America in general, but to our own State in particular. We have seen this westward drift of civilization, until upon these shores of the Pacific the marching column has taken its last stand. This point completes the circle, and in conformity with what has gone before, we might logically expect that this last triumph should be the greatest. The necessary conditions are here particularly favorable. The climatic influences are of the most invigorating character. Nature has been profuse in her decorations. There are lofty mountains, deep cañons, extensive plains, rolling hills, luxuriant vegetation; in short, everything conducive to the development of man into the highest and most nearly perfect mental, moral, and physical characteristics.

Conceding, then, for the sake of argument, as well as for the many good reasons that may be advanced, that this coast, while being the final point which empire may reach in its march, contains all the conditions necessary for and favorable to the development of the highest type of man the world has yet known, the object of this brief paper plainly becomes apparent and the questions at once arise: What are we doing, and what can and should we do to bring about this state of possible perfection?

We, as physicians, are the conservators of the mental and physical health of the people. Our office is not alone to alleviate suffering and heal disease, but to exercise as well the science of prevention. Most especially in this latter particular does the work devolve upon those composing the convention here assembled. What are we doing to aid the present generation and the future generations of California in ren