by dismiss to
the limbo of unavoidable accidents and discomforts, like flies,
mosquitoes, and stubbed toes, which are best treated with a shrug of the
shoulders and such stoic philosophy as we can muster. They are
interesting, because the moment we begin to study them intelligently we
stumble upon some of the profoundest and most far-reaching problems of
resistance to disease; important, because, trifling as we regard them,
and indeed largely just because we so regard them, they kill, or
handicap for life, more children in civilized communities than the most
deadly pestilence. Measles, for instance, according to the last United
States census, causes yearly nearly thirteen thousand deaths, while
smallpox causes so few that it is not listed among the important causes
of death. Scarlet fever causes sixty-three hundred and thirty-three
deaths, as compared with barely five thousand from appendicitis and the
same number from rheumatism. Whooping-cough causes ninety-nine hundred
and fifty-eight deaths, more than double the mortality from diabetes and
nearly equal to that of malarial fever.

In medicine, as in war, the gravest and deadliest mistake that you can
make is to despise your enemy. These trivial disorders, these trifling
ailments, which every one takes as a matter of course, and expects to go
through with, like teething, tight shoes, and learning to smoke, sweep
away every year in these United States the lives of from forty to fifty
thousand children, reaching the bad eminence of fifth upon our mortality
lists, only consumption, pneumonia, heart disease, and diarrh[oe]al
diseases ranking above them. Of course, it is obvious that these
diseases outrank many other more serious ones among the "captains of the
men of death," largely upon the familiar principle of the old riddle,
whereby the white sheep eat more grass than the black, "because there
are more of them."

While only a relatively small percentage of us ever have the bad luck to
be attacked by typhoid fever, rheumatism, or appendicitis, to say
nothing of cholera and smallpox, the vast majority of us have gone
through two or more of these diseases of childhood; so that, though the
death-rate of each and all of them is low, yet the number of cases is so
enormous that the absolute total mounts high. But the pity and, at the
same time, the practical importance of this heavy death-roll is that _at
least two-thirds of it is absolutely preventable_, and by the exercis