is obviously a matter of the most urgent necessity in military service, 

 in which the stress and strain upon organic functions are out of all pro- 

 portion to the normal degree of endurance demanded by the exigencies 

 of every-day labor and life. It has properly been observed by 

 Lieutenant-Colonel Frank R. Keefer, M. D., an authority on military 

 hygiene and sanitation, that "Not every man is suitable for a soldier," 

 and "A man may be a good insurance risk and yet be entirely unfitted 

 for military service." His conclusion, however, that only a small 

 percentage are qualified is not in exact conformity to the facts of 

 physical anthropology properly applied to the exceedingly complex 

 requirements of the numerous branches of the military service which 

 cannot possibly be standardized without a risk of substantial and even 

 far-reaching errors in the selection of recruits or conscripts, as the case 

 may be. As stated by Lieutenant-Colonel Keefer, "The number of men 

 rejected for one reason or another, but chiefly on account of physical 

 deficiency, greatly exceeds those accepted," and "only one in three or 

 four is taken by officers on recruiting duty in cities, and this percentage 

 is still further reduced by a rigid medical scrutiny at recruiting depots 

 to which provisionally accepted applicants are sent prior to taking the 

 oath of enlistment." It is the purpose of the present discussion to 

 emphasize with the required brevity certain fundamental considerations 

 of army anthropometry as a branch of the army medical service 

 demanding decidedly higher average technical qualifications on the part 

 of the examiner and the use of more strictly scientific methods and 

 standards of measurement, with a due regard to the racial characteris- 

 tics or inherited physical race traits of the recruit or conscript subject 

 to examination and the risk of improper acceptance or rejection for 

 military service, as the case may be. The observations by Keefer 

 may be referred to as evidence to sustain this conclusion, for his 

 views require only to be restated to emphasize their inherent limita- 

 tions when applied to the end in view of the highest attainable ideal 

 in the physical and medical selection of men for duty in the army and 

 navy during a time of war. He remarks, "The physical deficiencies 

 which cause the greatest number of rejections for our army are venereal 

 diseases, heart abnormalities, defective vision and hearing, foot 

 deformities and poor physique." Now, venereal diseases, of course, 

 are pathological impairments, regardless of the fact that they 

 cause physical deterioration or incapacity for service in much the 

 same manner as any other diseased condition of the body, whether 

 tuberculosis, typhoid fever, etc. To confuse venereal diseases 

 with physical deficiencies of the body is as serious an error as to confuse 

 organic defects of the lungs or heart with defects of lung capacity or 

 heart function due to strictly physical and ascertainable causes. 



12 



