60

60-c- X-rays

New Haven has about 14,000 boys & girls in its high and junior-high schools. This week as many of the 14,000 as have 60-c- to spare for health will strip to the waist, don clean cotton shirts, have their chests x-rayed to learn whether or not they have tuberculosis, enlarged hearts, dropped stomachs or other visceral derangement. Last year New Haven's progressive Department of Health & Board of Education found that 215 out of 563 children in one grade school had traces of tuberculosis. Of the 215, 71 (12.6% of the total) definitely had the disease. Health officials hope that the rate among the older students examined this week will be less, although they worried, "our greatest problem in tuberculosis at this time is among our children in the teen age and young adult life. Tuberculosis still causes more deaths between 18 and 35 years than any other single disease."

X-ray films cost New Haven $3 a pupil last year. The 60-c- rate is possible because a New York photo-engraver mused. Three Powers brothers own & operate Powers Photo Engraving Co., one of the nation's biggest & best, and a half-dozen allied concerns. Brother Augustin Jay Powers, president, has currently been functioning as publicity man for New York City Democrats. Brother John Michael Powers is the financial man of the three. Brother Frank Thomas Powers, 50, is the tinkerer. Four years ago Tinkerer Frank Powers, to cheapen production costs in the Powers plants, which use thousands of photographs and rods of photographic printing paper, mechanized photography. He perfected a process of making photographic paper in long rolls similar to wrapping paper, invented a device to snip off lengths of paper as they were exposed, send them to a developing tank. A friend of the Brothers Powers is Henry Collier Wright, president of the Queensboro Tuberculosis Association. Mr. Wright last year heard Dr. Jay Arthur Myers of the University of Minnesota medical school declare that If every case of incipient tuberculosis in children could be discerned, doctors could ultimately wipe it out. Mr. Wright told this to Tinkerer Frank Powers who mused, perfected a system which would take 100 positive x-ray pictures on a roll of paper without using celluloid film at all. With Cloyd Mason Chapman, onetime Edison engineer, he then developed an x-ray machine which automatically focuses the x-rays on the subject to be examined and adjusts the x-ray current to the proper intensity. With this device two operators can make x-ray pictures of three persons a minute. The Powers x-ray pictures are not quite so clear as standard x-ray films. But they suffice, say those who have used them,* to spot evidences of tuberculosis; and they are much cheaper than films. The inventors of the Powers x-ray apparatus frankly say that it is useless for any one school to buy their machine & service, because children need be examined only once a year, and that process takes only a few hours. They will ship their machine around the country, develop the pictures themselves. At the present time, depending upon several variables, the individual x-rays cost from 60-c- to $1 each.

*The Queensboro Tuberculosis & Health Association and the Milbank Memorial Fund's Bellevue-Yorkville Health Demonstration--on 12,600 children.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.