cerning the fundamentals of good nutrition in terms of adequate, well-
balanced diets.

A picture of the activities of the past two decades would show in-
dustrious scientists in pursuit of new knowledge; health and education
departments eager to apply every form of disease prevention proved
to be safe and good; and enthusiastic nonofficial lay and professional
groups working together to safeguard life and health. And into this
picture the Federal Government has recently stepped with financial
aid under the Social Security Act of 1935 for public health and welfare
activities in the various States.

Thus the young men of 21 to 25 upon whom the hand of the Selective
Service Act of 1940 principally falls, have grown to manhood in one of
the richest flowering times of medicine and public health. They have
had the benefit of the extraordinary progress made in curative and
preventive medicine, besides being the objects of a wide-scale program
of health guidance and protection which was greatly expanded since or
shortly before they were born. No wonder that deep interest attaches
to the relative importance of the various causes of disqualification in
the two drafts! Never before has it been possible to examine medically
a sizable cross-section of two succeeding generations in the civilian
population at approximately the same age level, the second generation
the beneficiary of efforts initiated by the shortcomings of the first.

At first sight it would appear that we have in the two sets of examina-
tions a clear-cut and concrete check on the success of those efforts. As
a matter of fact, this is not so. It is impossible to compare the incom-
parable. Early indications that more than 40 percent of the men
examined under the Selective Service Act of 1940 are being classified
as unfit for general military service has tended to give the impression
that the health of American youth is inferior today to what it was 20
years ago in spite of all our efforts to improve it. However, neither the
situation, the purpose, the means of measuring health status, nor the
physical standards are the same today as they were in 1917-1918.

The very progress which has made it possible to give better health
protection also enables physicians to give better physical examinations.
Diagnostic techniques and instruments and tests for detecting objective
signs of defects in structure and function have been vastly improved.
The very insistence on the right of youth to be “well born,” well
nourished, adequately protected against communicable diseases, and
free of remediable defects has tended to raise the standards of physical
and mental fitness. We have become “allergic” to malnutrition, dental
caries, preventable diseases of every description, even though we have
not yet found a way to apply universally the known methods of dealing
with them. Finally when the Selective Service Act of 1940 was passed
we were not at war as we were when conscription was put in force in
1917. There has not been the immediate urgency for man-power that
makes expedient the sifting of men through a coarser screen than is
used in less hurried times.