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Problem of Indian Administration

schools maintained by the government. Adequate physical examinations of the Indian children in these boarding schools and adequate records would have disclosed to a qualified public health physician the existence of a very serious health problem in these schools. His approach to this problem would have been primarily to seek the causes and to remedy them and to prevent the spread of contagion. The cure or relief of the individual. sufferer would have been undertaken too, but emphasis would have been placed on prevention. A real public health physician would have promptly called attention to these vital facts:

  1. The Indian children in boarding schools are generally below normal in health as compared with standards for white children.
  2. The appropriations for food for these children are not sufficient to secure for them a suitable, balanced diet for well children, much less for children whose health is below normal.
  3. The boarding schools are generally crowded beyond their capacity so that the individual child does not have sufficient light and air.
  4. The boarding school dormitories are generally of the congregate institutional type so that those who are below par in health cannot be isolated from the others. Contagious diseases under these circumstances have almost free scope.
  5. The normal day at the boarding schools, with its marked industrial features, is a heavy day even for well, strong children. It is too much for a child below normal. Added to insufficiency of diet and over-crowding, it may be an explanation of the low general health among children in Indian boarding schools.

As will be discussed at length in the following pages, the medical service at the boarding schools has on the whole been inadequate. The evidence seems to warrant the statement that the first requirement of a thorough physical examination of each child on admission and periodically thereafter has not been met. Examinations have been made, to be sure, but at one of the leading schools they were seen by members of the survey staff put through at the rate of seventy-two an hour. The boarding school doctors have not been called upon to direct the régime of the school from the standpoint of health conservation and development.

The Indian Service has recognized two great health problems, probably the outstanding two, namely, tuberculosis and trachoma.