Medicine: Health in Poverty

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President Hoover, attempting to estimate the national charity which will be needed next winter (see p. 8), last week announced: "There is a test, and a very positive test by which the success of [relief] can be determined. That is, the effect of distress upon public health. I have some years of experience in dealing with problems of distress and relief, and we have always tested the efficacy of relief by the reflex in public health."

He had called on the chief of the nation's health army, Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming, for the health figures of 1928, when jobs were plenty, for comparison with the health figures of the two Depression years. Surgeon General Gumming promptly replied with batteries of comparable statistics and with comments.

With a practiced eye that knew what it was going to find (the Surgeon General reported the nation unusually healthy last winter—TIME, Dec. 15, 1930), the President scanned Dr. Cumming's data and with no delay consoled the nation thus: "In brief [the Gumming report] shows that the general mortality, the infant mortality, the sickness in the country was less in the winter of 1931 than the winters of full employment in 1928 and 1929. The public health has apparently never been better than it has been over the past six months. It is a most creditable showing of the effort which the country made last winter and one for which the voluntary organizations and local officials are entitled to a very great deal of credit."

As the Germans have noted since the War, poverty forces frugality. Frugality prevents overeating, stimulates healthy exertion, resistance to disease. The current flare-up of infantile paralysis in & around New York City is seasonal, local, was dying down last week.