The End of the Epidemic

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18366, 27 April 1925, Page 10

The End of the Epidemic

The lifting of the epidemic restrictions will be felt more as a mental relief than as a release from any other kind of bondage. After all there has been remarkably little disorganisation of life except in one direction; but there lias been widespread public anxiety, from which, for a time at least, the community has now been freed. And it may happen before another epidemic is due that medical science will know how to prevent it. Instead of telling us in 1930 that poliomyelitis is not a mysterious disease, but simply a disease that they don't understand, doctors may be able to say then that they have isolated the causative agent and can control it. The very least we should bo able to fcount on after five years is that they should know whether a disease which is "not considered highly infectious," against which there is "a high rate "of natural immunity," but which "most of. the children at the present •' time must have had in one form or "another," justifies the closing of the schools and the attempted imprisonment in their homes of all young people under sixteen years of age. The strongest evidence we have had in Christchurch that isolation is effective —if it really is evidence, and not merely a careless report-4s the escape of certain orphanages whose inmates were allowed no contact of any kind with the outside world. On the other hand, everybody knows that the degree of isolation maintained even by the most careful families proved ineffective over and over again. While the restrictions were considered necessary and were actually in force it would have been wrong to criticise them, but it is very difficult to regard such an address as that from which we have quoted as a sound defence of the official policy. And with regard to the schools the lesson has been that a system may work quite well when conditions are normal, and yet break down more or less completely when its routine is disturbed. "We have no desire to add to what we have said already about the first attempts to teach by correspondence—unless to say that the later attempts were very good indeed; but if the medical profession cannot protect us from epidemics, the teaching profession will have to protect us a little better than it did this year against the educational consequences. It would seem to be necessary to have some teachers at least in each centre trained in educational first aid—a headquarters staff which, if an emergency arose again, would organise and train the others.

New Book Day at the Library.

One of the sights of the City last wco k—the most arresting of all sights after the Anzac procession—was an extended queue waiting for the Public Library to open. Even though the explanation was a desire, predatory rather than scholarly, to get the first pick of an issue of new books, it is something to see four hundred people in Christchurch visiting the Library on the same day. It is probably true—as someone lamented recently iu the "Fortnightly" —that "an enormous majority of the "people who have been taught to read "neglect or abuse the faculty," but it is better to think of the faithful four hundred than of. the indifferent hundred thousand. Perhaps, too. it is not wise to suggest, as that "Fortnightly" hypochondriac does, how to make people read. The Librarian was trying a plan last week when he got his queue, and he has very wisely decided to try it again; but there is of course no permanent plan for making people wiser than they are or want to be. One of the American experiments in this field is the peripatetic librarian—the man who goes out into the highways and the byways, but more especially into the various wards of a great city, gauging the literary wants of societies, firms, schools, families, and trying at the same time to colour those wants. Here we arc not quite numerous enough for developments of that kind, and if we were it would be useless to attempt thrusting improving books «ii people who did not want them. It is useless to attempt that anywhere—even, perhaps, in school. With tact and intelligence teachers and librarians may do a great deal to keep reading above a certain low level of stupidity, but if they lay their baits too high they will discover that their traps are never sprung.