The Ocala banner. (Ocala, Marion County, Fla.) 1883-194?, 1911-02-24
The Deadly Drinking Cup in the
School Room
Pres. woman's Club,

The Deadly Drinking Cup in the
School Room
The trouble seems to have been
that, in the zeal for stnffing Johnny
with useful knowledge people forget
that he was an animal before he was
a man. They passed compulsory ed
ucation laws compelling him to stay
in school until he was fourteen; but
they paid mighty little attention to
the fundamental fact that the welfare
of his marvellous mind-to say nothing
of his immortal soul-depended very
largely on that of his equally marvel
GUS body. They drove him into the
school house, where he acquired, with
almost equal certainty, mathematics
and mumps, spelling and sore throat,
grammar and grip. Later-the period
of fads in the public schools drawing
and diphthearia were added to the
curriculum.
1t was the doctors who first gave
the alarm And here let it be remark
ed, to the honor of the brotherhood of
Aesculapius, that physicians are the
only class of men in the world whose
hardest and most jealous work is de.
voted to the destruction of the pros
poets of their own business.
Doctors had long noticed how the
number of cases of sickness increased
particularly among children of
school age-when the public schools
opened in the fall One of them noted
all the cases of diphtheria reported
among children in the United States
, during a period of four years. Out OF
these statistics he constructed a
graphic and Illuminating chart In
E August, the middle of the long vaca-
ton, there were six thousand cases.
With the first of September the count
began to rise rapidly. Within month
it had climbed to ten thousand and by
Christmas time, when the first school
term was over, it had reached the
great number of fourteen thousand.
: Why?
The school drinking cup was the
first criminal. 1t was discovered that
in almost every case, where common
cup or glass has been in use for a
week, its edges are covered with thou
sands of virulent disease germs and
that even in cases where it appears
to be quite clean. Abolish the com.
mon drinking vessel! In many schools
this was done, sanitary drinking foun.
tains or individual cups being substi.
tuted. And where this was done the
number of cases of contagious dis
eases began to decrease. Take warn
ing from this experience, several
states have since forbidden by law
the use of the common drinking cups
anywhere within their boundaries
When Pullman train for instance
crosses the Kansas state line the
porter goes through and gathers up
all the glasses in the smoaking rooms
Those cranks out in the Sunfower
state interfere with the personal liber'
ty of even a casual traveller to the
extent that they do not permit him
to acquire a contagious disease in that
particular manner until he gets over
the line into Missouri or Colorado.
Meanwhile it is true that probably
four-ffths of all the school-children
in the United States still drink from
common cups; but the subject is
everywhere being agitated and within
few years it is likely that the per-
centage will be reversed. In Chicago,
for instance, where there are between
three and four hundred thousand
children on the rolls, the superintend.
emit, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, and the
school board are planning to install
sanitary drinking fountains, at which
the pupils may drink direct from the
bubbling water.
BY the way, the Hindu always
drinks by raising the cup and pour
ing the water into his mouth without
touching the edges of the vessel with
his lips, moved thereto by the ridicul-
GUS idea that he may be in some way
contaminated by using cup that
other men have defiled Those be-
nighted heather customs are so alb
surd!
But disease may be communicated
| in many other ways. 1t began to be
: plain that the only certain course was
carefully to inspect little Johnny
Jones, to see that when he brought a
nice red apple to school-to give dear
teacher he did not at the same