can build a firm foundation for an organization capable of fighting successfully social diseases (tuberculosis, venereal diseases, child mortality, etc.) as well as anti-sanitary housing conditions. 5) It is necessary to immediately begin an extensive sanitary-educational propaganda among the population (readings, lectures, exhibitions, etc.). 6) Forms of the population's participation in medical and sanitary activities, and forms of its self-activity must be radically changed: a most extensive participation in those activities by organized labor and poor peasants is required."
For this purpose a People's Commissariat to safeguard health has been established. Around this Commissariat are grouped various medical and sanitary branches at the present time functioning in different localities. The central Commissariat has been in charge of the whole medical business and issues directions to local Commissariats of kindred nature.
A physician, engaged in school work, must raise the whole spirit of the school, which is a laboratory for the forging of the man of the future. The proletariat has lit the torch of education and has for its object—the utilization of all the progressive methods of Western pedagogy, school sanitation and general science subjects.
After the November Revolution a school-sanitary Soviet was established at the People's Commissariat of Education, its object being the protection of the children's health, as an essential prerequisite for a high standard of health for the population in general.
DOCUMENT No. 14
School Sanitation Board
At the Congress of medical-sanitation held at Moscow, June 19, 1918, there was read and discussed at great length the report from the school-sanitation board attached to the Commissariat of Public Instruction. The Section is entrusted with safeguarding the children's health and the application of preventive measures in schools against tuberculosis and neurological diseases.
Hitherto in Russia little time was devoted to physical education of children and their hygienic conditions. At the present time the School Sanitation Board does the work of spreading physical education among children and of removal of conditions38
