fore, suggests the urgency of radical reforms as regards both 

 standardized methods of physical and medical examination in recruit- 

 ing and the subsequent tabulation, classification and publication of the 

 returns. 



COMPARATIVE CAUSES OF REJECTION FOR 

 MILITARY SERVICE 



The questions involved in the practical use of army anthropometry 

 and medical statistics are of such obvious vital importance, not only 

 to the military authorities but to the public at large, that unnecessary 

 delay in the required changes and improvements must be considered 

 as contrary to public policy and the scientific spirit of the age. It is 

 difficult to understand how so important a branch of statistics should 

 have been so conspicuously neglected that not much more than a 

 beginning has been made toward placing the army anthro- 

 pometric and medical statistics upon a thoroughly well-developed 

 scientific basis and above the serious criticism of inherent un- 

 trustworthiness and practical uselessness. Even the great work of 

 Prof. Dr. H. Schwiening fails to meet modern requirements, due 

 primarily to the inherent limitations of the data in consequence of 

 the neglect on the part of the military authorities to properly develop 

 the statistical branch of the army medical and recruiting services. The 

 statistics for the various foreign countries utilized for the present 

 purposes and chiefly derived from the work of Schwiening cannot, 

 therefore, be accepted as conclusive evidence of the physical superiority 

 or inferiority of the different army groups or of the same group at 

 different periods of time. No two countries, apparently, follow the 

 same methods of recruiting, of physical examination, the same rules 

 and regulations in physical and medical rejections and, finally, the 

 same classification and tabulation of returns. The status of the prob- 

 lem in this respect is much the same as some twenty years ago was 

 true of general mortality statistics, the reform of which dates from 

 the now almost universal adoption of the Bertillon or international 

 classification of causes of death. 



These limitations in army medical statistics explain the contradictory 

 nature of many of the conclusions based upon crude and far-from- 

 satisfactory returns. Thus, for illustration, it is frequently not entirely 

 clear whether rejection ratios are derived from recruiting material 

 subjected to a previous process of the elimination of the obviously 

 unfit or from the entire material subject to conscription or selective 

 draft. It is also often doubtful, especially as regards anthropometric 

 statistics, whether the official data have reference to the recruiting 

 material previously to medical selection or merely to accepted recruits, 

 as was the case in the United States Army before the war. Now, of 

 course, such a selected group cannot be considered typical of the normal 



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