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Report of the County Medical Officer—Education. 217
school a definite time should be fixed for physical exercises at a period when all the children will be
present; that certain children designated by the doctor should be excluded from all forms of exercises
; that for the rest a short period of 10 minutes a day should be devoted to physical education,
but that the syllabus should be limited to breathing exercises and free arm movements. Kindergarten
games form a suitable type of recreation for many children but do not replace organised
exercises; where such games are utilised for the purpose of recreation it is essential to exclude all
children concerning whom it has been noted by the doctor that physical exercises are not to be
carried out since there would be risk of injury to the child or to any remedial apparatus worn.
During the year proposals were made to extend a system of scout training to boys in attendance
at the physically defective schools, a very modified form of scouting being adopted, on account
of the physical disabilities of the children. It was found, upon enquiry, that any boy who was in
attendance at a physically defective school could join the troop of physically defective scouts, which had
already been formed, and that the members included a boy with severe spinal caries, one with tuberculous
disease of the hip, using crutches, and three with severe heart disease. None of these were
really fit to go to the scout meetings, or to do even the modified work and games there carried out.
If such scout instruction were to be extended, it would be necessary to select the boys after medical
examination, and to carry on the work under medical supervision. Scouting would then become
practically a special extension of school work, and would lose most of its special features and therefore
of its value, i It is very doubtful if any scouting for physically defective children could be carried on
with real benefit to the boys.
Mr. Bishop Harman, the ophthalmologist to the Council's special schools for the blind and deaf,
has devoted special attention to the effect of venereal disease upon the children, and the extent to
which these effects are found amongst the elementary school population of London. He has
obtained statistics from three sources:—the examination of the children attending: the Council's
blind schools; the examination of groups of children attending the ordinary elementary schools; the
examination of the case papers of elementary school children attending one of the treatment centres.
All the children admitted to either the special day or residential schools established under
the Elementary Education Blind and Deaf Children Act, 1893, are examined by Mr. Harman.
The state of their case is recorded, the cause of the blindness is ascertained, either by the
clinical evidence of the case, or by additional enquiry from the parents or guardians of the child,
or by enquiry directed to the hospital authority under whose care the child has been at any time.
Most of these children are examined on a number of occasions. The Council's day blind schools
are visited every six months whilst the residential schools are visited every three months,
and a report is made on the state of each child, particularly as regards its suitability or not for
continuing to be a pupil at that school, a determination which rests mainly on the state of the eyes.
There is no part of the body where the effects of venereal disease inherited or contracted by the
children from their parents are so distinctive and so permanent as in the eve. When therefore the
distinctive features are found in the eyes of children, and there is confirmatory evidence from
symptoms in other organs of the body, or when there is definite historical evidence dating the onset
of a particular attack of inflammation, the value of these statistics becomes considerable.

Amongst the confirmatory signs of inherited syphilis "bad family history." has been placed. Bad family
In the following table Mr. Harman has given the histories as regards reproduction of 150 families, history,
with 1,001 pregnancies.
23610 ff
Scout
training for
physically
defective
children.
Effects of
venereal
disease upon
children.
Blind and
partially
blind
children.