The biggest killer of children between the ages of five and 15 is rheumatic heart disease. In one year it claims almost twice as many victims as infantile paralysis does in ten. Today, about 1,000,000 people have been left crippled by this insidious, recurring malady.
Yet rheumatic heart disease, which smolders in slum districts and overcrowded tenements does not get a fraction of the publicity given to cancer or tuberculosis.
In the whole country there are only some 1,000 special sanatorium beds to tide victims over their long, hazardous convalescence. In most cities the...