Medicine: Homework

Doctors do not know exactly what causes rheumatic fever, which is one of the worst killers of children, and sometimes leaves even its survivors with badly damaged hearts. But one researcher believes that he has spotted the killer’s breeding grounds: poor and broken homes.

“The disease tends to breed in families where serious, long-standing social problems exist,” Dr. Robert Jackson of the University of Iowa reported this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Students of rheumatic fever cannot fail to learn how important wholesome family life is to the welfare of children, and how devastating immoral practices, such as selfishness, greed, drunkenness, promiscuity and divorce, are to wholesome family life. Only when an attack on these complicated detrimental forces is made, utilizing supernatural and natural resources, can one hope for the eradication of this scourge of childhood.”* Citing his study of the case histories of 266 Iowa rheumatic children, Dr. Jackson offers some advice to other doctors with rheumatic fever cases: check the patient’s home life. Then, “when it is found inadequate, as it most frequently is, the work of raising the level of the environment should be started immediately.”

* There is no sure cure for rheumatic fever. The standard prescription is rest, sunlight and a wholesome diet.