Medicine: Telling the Children

A perennial problem for grownups is how to tell the children. Last week produced two lively ways of telling the children: a new book on sex, and an animated cartoon on tuberculosis.

Bees and Babies. At Manhattan’s City & Country School, Dr. Milton Isra Levine tells children how babies come. Ten years ago, when he started, he went through the old, old rigmarole about the bees and flowers. A twelve-year-old asked: “When are you going to come to the point?” Dr. Levine promptly sat down and had the youngster tell him.

Last week the doctor and his wife, Jean H. Seligmann, produced the result of that experience: a sky-blue little book called The Wonder of Life (Simon & Schuster; $1.75). Since the pupils had a hand in it, the book is as fresh as a daisy, has no trace of talking down. At home Dr. Levine answers every question of his three-year-old daughter. But he does not try to burden her with all the facts of life. Since his book has a solid grounding in biology, and gives detailed sex information, Dr. Levine recommends it for children past ten.

The book starts with a chapter on the origin of life. Eels, explains Dr. Levine, are not born from mud, nor caterpillars from leaves; like almost all other animals, they develop from the union of sperm cells and egg cells. Next comes the reproduction of fish and frogs, a barnyard view of chickens and cows. After the cow comes man. Dr. Levine bridges the gap with two pictures: a mother nursing her baby, a calf nuzzling at the udder.

The book gives a simple, functional description of male and female sex organs, with clear diagrams, and a chapter on pregnancy and childbirth which many adults might do well to read. A unique feature of the book is an account of the human sex act. Love, says the doctor, “is extremely enjoyable. . . . And all the things that go with love and marriage . . . are normal, natural and right.”

Skulls to Cartoons. Until recently, health organizations tried to scare people about syphilis and tuberculosis with posters of gaunt men on crutches, skinny mothers spitting blood, public drinking cups shaped like skulls. Today public health educators have turned from the strategy of terror to the wiles of entertainment.

Last week the National Tuberculosis Association took a cue from Walt Disney, released the first animated cartoon on public health. The picture, which combines photographs with drawings, is called “Goodbye, Mr. Germ.” It tells the adventures of “Tee Bee,” who swims around from lung to lung, raising an enormous family, and drilling through lung-pipes. The germ, who wears a top hat and cackles like The Shadow, finally gets trapped in a sanatorium. Message: watch out for lingering coughs, get tuberculin tests and X-rays.

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer of Manhattan (the hero’s name is Edgar) and animated by Horace L. Roberts Jr., the film cost only $5,200 to produce, will be distributed for the asking to grammar schools, clubs, parent-teacher organizations.