[Footnote 2:  Public Health Reports, U. S. Public Health Service, vol. 34, No. 16, pp. 777-782 (April 18, 1919).]

The cost to the individual in loss of wages, doctors’ bills, and otherwise, is a serious matter, to say nothing of the absolute want to which it reduces many families and the suffering entailed.  In addition to this, the country loses the wage earner’s production.  Sometimes death brings to the family permanent loss of income, and to the nation complete loss of the product of the wage earner’s work.  The nation spends large sums of money every year in providing for dependent families and individuals.

If each of the 38 million wage earners in the United States in 1910 lost 6 days from work in a year, how many days’ work would the nation lose?  How many years of work would this amount to?

At $2.50 a day (is this a high wage?) how much would be lost in wages in a year?

Get information regarding the cost of a long case of sickness, such as typhoid fever, in some family of your acquaintance (perhaps your own), including doctor’s bills, medicines, time lost from work, etc.

What would such expense mean to a family living on as low wages as those mentioned on page 167?

EDUCATION AND PHYSICAL DEFECTS

Moreover, the nation loses a great deal (how much cannot be calculated) from the physical unfitness of many who keep on working, but who are not fully efficient because of bodily defects or ailments.  We see the results of this even in school.  Pupils who lag behind their mates in their studies are often suffering from physical defects of which their teachers, and even they themselves, may be unaware.  It may be that they are ill-nourished, or that they have defective vision, or hearing, or teeth, or that they sleep in poorly ventilated rooms.  The community does not get its money’s worth from its schools if its children are not in physical condition to profit by them.  In a similar manner earning and productive power are reduced.

PHYSICAL UNFITNESS IN RURAL COMMUNITIES

It has usually been assumed that the people in rural districts are more healthy than those who live in cities; but it has been found that there is as much physical unfitness there as elsewhere.  It is true that the records of the war department seem to show fewer men rejected in rural districts as totally unfit for any kind of military service; but evidence of other kinds has been collected that indicates that some kinds of disease, at least, and many physical defects are more prevalent in the country than in the city.  In the Lure of the land, Dr. Harvey Wiley makes a comparison of the death rate from certain diseases in a few states where the figures are available for both city and country.

[Footnote:  Dr. Harvey Wiley, the Lure of the land, Chapter viii, “Health on the Farm,” pp. 53-60.]