MEDICAL INSPECTION OF SCHOOLS 



people to a race of dwellers in towns and cities. The school 

 year has changed from a three months' winter term to one of five 

 hours per day for ten months during the year. The number of 

 years of school life has greatly increased. We have passed com- 

 pulsory education laws. Going to school has become not only 

 the normal but the required occupation of all children for a 

 considerable number of years. 



The results of these changed conditions on the health of 

 children have become so marked as insistently to demand atten- 

 tion. The parents, school authorities, and health authorities 

 have been unable to avoid recognizing the fact that in the nature 

 of the case the school has become the most certain center of 

 infection in the community. 



The state, to provide for its own protection, has decreed 

 that all children must attend school, and has put in motion the 

 all-powerful but undiscriminating agency of compulsory education, 

 which gathers in the rich and the poor, the bright and the dull, 

 the healthy and the sick. The object was to insure that these 

 children should have sound minds. One of the unforeseen results 

 was to insure that they should have unsound bodies. Medical 

 inspection is the device created to remedy this condition. Its ob- 

 ject is prevention and cure. 



Wherever established, the good results of medical inspection 

 have been evident. Epidemics have been checked or avoided. 

 Improvements have been noted in the cleanliness and neatness 

 of the children. Teachers and parents have come to know that 

 under the new system it is safe for children to continue in school 

 in times of threatened or actual epidemic. 



But medical inspection does not stop here, nor has it limited 

 its activities to the field outlined. Other problems have been 

 insistently forcing themselves on the attention of school men; and 

 they, knowing something of the wonderful advances made in the 

 field of medicine, have turned for aid to the physicians. 



With the changes in the length of the school term, and the 

 increase in the. number of years of schooling demanded of the child, 

 has come a great advance in the standards of the work required. 

 When the standards were low, the work was not beyond the capac- 

 ity of even the weaker children; but with close grading, fuller 



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