Abstract
TESS than three years ago there did not exist a medical department of the Board of Education. To-day there lies before us a Blue-book, of 170 pages, detailing, with much substance, the work undertaken or done to establish and regulate the vast system of medical inspection of schools and school children now operative over the length and breadth of England. In modern social history no movement has come so rapidly to maturity as the system of inspection here, for the first time, placed in a connected way before the general and official public. In a lucid preliminary section Dr. Newman briefly sketches the relation of our present developments to the efforts, both here and on the Continent, towards a systematic medical supervision of school children. “In the latter year (1865), the report of the School Commission in Norway did something to bring the importance of school hygiene once more before the general public, and in 1866 Hermann Cohn undertook his classic researches into the eyesight of over 10,000 children at Breslau” (p. 2). Cohn, now dead, was one of the venerable figures at the first International Congress of School Hygiene at Nuremberg. He was still full of energy and enthusiasm. Much occasional and disconnected local work followed, but “the Wiesbaden system marks the introduction of a new conception and understanding of the problem. This system, which has been widely adopted in Germany, treats the child as the centre of interest and his well-being as the end of reform, to which even the most satisfactory school environment is only a means.... Throughout the German Empire a large number of school doctors have been appointed, and so some 350 towns and communities have undertaken in a greater or less degree the work of medical supervision of school life” (p. 4)—a good result since the first appointments in Wiesbaden in 1896,
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References
Board of Education. Annual Report for 1908 of the Chief Medical Officer of the Board of Education. Pp. 170. Cd. 4986. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1910.) Price 8½d.
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The Medical Inspection of School Children 1 . Nature 84, 57–58 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/084057a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/084057a0