e
of only a very moderate amount of intelligence and vigilance. It is, of
course, obvious that in a group of diseases which numbers its victims
literally by the million every year there will inevitably occur a
certain minute percentage of fatal results due to what might be termed
unavoidable causes, like a badly nourished condition of the child
attacked, unusual circumstances preventing proper shelter or nursing, or
an exceptional virulence of the disease, such as will occur in two or
three cases of every thousand in even the most trifling infectious
malady. But even after making liberal allowance for what might be termed
the unavoidable fatalities, at least two-thirds, and more probably
nine-tenths, of the deaths from children's diseases might be prevented
upon two grounds:--

First, that they are contagious and absolutely dependent upon a living
germ, whose spread can be prevented; and secondly, and practically even
more important, that more than half the deaths from them are due, not to
the disease itself, but to complications occurring during the period of
recovery, caused, for the most part, by gross carelessness on the part
of the mother or nurse. A large majority, for instance, of the nearly
thirteen thousand deaths attributed to measles are due to bronchitis,
caught by letting the child go out-of-doors too soon after recovery,
which means, of course, either a chill falling upon the irritated and
weakened bronchial mucous membrane, or an infection by one of the score
of disease-germs, such as those of influenza, pneumonia, bronchitis, and
even tuberculosis, which are continually lying in wait for just such an
emergency as this--just such a weakening of the vital resistance.

It is a sadly familiar statement in the history of fatal cases of
tuberculosis that the trouble "began with an attack of measles," or
whooping-cough, or a bad cold, and was mistaken for a mere "hanging on"
of one of these milder maladies until it had gained a foothold that
there was no dislodging. As breakers of the wall of the hollow square of
the body-cells, drawn up to resist the cavalry charges of tuberculosis,
pneumonia, and rheumatism, few can be compared in deadliness with the
diseases of childhood and "common colds."

Further, while all of them except scarlet fever have a mortality so low
that it might almost be described as what the French delicately term
_une quantite negligeable_, yet a surprisingly large number of the
survivors