The first week of visits by the county health officer to rural schools has brought pleasant surprises to the official. Dr. Collins reports elsewhere in The News Sunday that he has been everywhere greeted with cordial favor, that parents of children have met him and the health nurse at the school houses and indicated unusual interest in the undertaking and that the whole county seems peculiarly wide awake to the importance of this endeavour.
Such shows the remarkable translation in public thought that has taken place only within a few years. Just a little while ago such a work as Dr. Collins and dr. McPhaul are doing would have been frowned upon, if not actually resisted. People didn’t think the State had any right to usurp the homes of the people and invade the territory of the family physician. Such relations were, more or less, revered and sacred and held to be inviolate, especially in rural regions where such relationships were more keenly developed than in the cities.
Now, however, the people are giving great welcome to the public effort being made to better health conditions; they want their children to share in the benefaction; they are insisting that what is being done at some one place be done also for them.
This, after all, is the hopeful aspect of the development. The State would never come to maximum efficiency in its prevention movements should the people not respond readily to its attempts Their co-operation is basic to success and their interest in such undertakings will make the movement a great victory for public health, for sturdier manhood and womanhood and for the prolongation of the life of those now falling within the scope of these beneficial activities of the government.
From The Charlotte News, Sunday, Feb. 12, 1922
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