The Medical Examination of Backward Children in Schools

Extract

We are apt to consider that, as the object of medical examination of school-children is the improvement of the national physique, such an object is already brought much nearer by the adoption of medical inspection. That it can only be reached through the individual and that these individuals are not responsible for their condition is apt to be overlooked, as is also the necessity for educating that part of the population responsible for the children in the various factors concerned in deterioration. At present the majority of children have parents uninterested in the means adopted in their education—they are at school, ergo, they will be educated; they have a physical instructor, a hygiene teacher, and now a school doctor, ergo, they will be made healthy or kept healthy.