A PHYSICAL CENSUS IN 
ENGLAND AND ITS LESSON 
Two-thirds of the Population Not Healthy 
examinations of drafted men in 
England for the first eight months 
of 1918, show that ‘between 
January 1 and August 31, 1918, the 
number of medical examinations con- 
ducted by National Service Medical 
Boards in Great Britain amounted to 
2,080,709. Of the two million men 
examined not more than 36 or 37 per 
cent were placed in Grade 1—that is, 
approximately only one in every three 
has attained the normal standard of 
health and strength and was capable 
of enduring physical exertion suitable 
to his age; the remainder—more than 
a million and a quarter—did not reach 
this standard. The suggestion has 
been made that the low proportion 
of fit men among those examined 
during this period was due to the fact 
that only the leavings of the popul- 
ation were under review. Analysis of 
the records available, however, shows 
that this is not the case, and that as 
a fact the men examined constituted a 
fair example of the male population 
between the ages of 18 and 43 and a 
smaller proportion of the more fit 
between 43 and51. Weare told further 
that the experience of the boards medi- 
cally examining women for national 
works corresponds broadly to that of 
the National Service Medical Boards 
examining men. Such evidence points 
only too clearly to a deplorably low 
state of health.” 
In comment on the above the Editor 
of the British Medical Journal makes the 
following remarks: 
“While it has not yet been possible 
to work out the details of this great 
mass of medical examinations, the pre- 
liminary results indicate that prevent- 
able disease is responsible for the bulk 
of the physical disabilities, and demon- 
? ‘HE RESULTS of the physical 
1 Edit., Brit. Med. Journal, 1918, 348-9. 
190 
strate the ravages which industrial life 
has made upon our real national capital 
—the health and vigor of the population. 
Too little food, too long hours of work, 
too little sleep, too little play, too little 
fresh air, too little comfort in the home 
are evidently the chief factors con- 
cerned in producing this mass of physical 
inefficiency with all its concomitant 
human misery and direct loss to the 
country. To take effective measures on 
the broadest lines to remedy this con- 
dition of things is a most urgent duty. 
Although real improvement can hardly 
be expected for one or two generations, 
the foundations of a better national 
physique can be laid at once?.”’ 
It would seem that this editorial 
writer in the British Medical Journal 
does not see into the complexity of the 
problem, or understand modern views 
on heredity. In so far as these disabil- 
ities are the result of a bad ‘environ- 
ment, an improvement may be rightly 
expected to accrue, and this change for 
the better may be looked for at once, 
not, as the editor supposes, after one or 
two generations. Does this writer cling 
to a belief in the inheritance of acquired 
traits? But is it not conceivably pos- 
sible that this physical deterioration is 
m part due to an adaptability of man- 
kind to a less brutal system of natural 
selection than took place among our 
primitive ancestors? Indiscriminate 
charity and excessive altruism, to say 
nothing of the inevitable and com- 
mendable features of civilization, have 
doubtless enabled the congenitally weak 
to survive. Large portions of the popu- 
lation are not healthy (Grade I in the 
martial sense), but they are neverthe- 
less healthy in sense of being able to sur- 
vive and beget offspring. This feature 
of the problem cannot be either denied 
or ignored.—F. A W. 
