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CHAPTER II.
REPORT OF THE SCHOOL MEDICAL OFFICER (Dr. F. N. K. MENZIES)
FOR THE YEAR 1925. PREPARED IN COLLABORATION WITH SIR
WILLIAM HAMER, WHOSE TERM OF OFFICE AS SCHOOL MEDICAL
OFFICER TERMINATED AT THE END OF THAT YEAR.
Introductory Note.
In recent school annual reports note has been made of the influence, now
clearly emerging to view, of the Education Act of 1870, upon health. Dr. J. F. J.
Sykes, the late Medical Officer of Health of St. Pancras, was one of the first to focus
attention upon a curious phenomenon presented by infant mortality, which after
being almost stationary for many years, prior to the end of the last century, suddenly
began to show decline, and has continued to do so almost uninterruptedly to the
present day. Nine years ago, in the London school report for 1916 (Ann. Rep.,
Vol. III., p. 4) this fall was ascribed to the fact that at the commencement of the
twentieth century the majority of parents had passed through the elementary
schools. Dr. James Wheatley, Medical Officer of Health of Shropshire, in the
summer of 1923, in an address before the British Medical Association at Portsmouth,
showed beyond all question that the predominating influence in promoting this
decline in infant mortality had been the Act of 1870, and he urged that "general
education had operated mainly by developing the sense of responsibility of parents
in the health and lives of their children." In the London school report of 1923
(pp. 95 and 96), it was indicated that there was a corresponding movement in death
rates at school ages. Again, last year, reference was made to a very interesting
paper by Dr. Gibson (Public Health, Vol. XXXVII., May, 1924), who quoted the
statement of Richard Browne (a seventeenth-century writer) to the effect that
"Infection, negligence and ignorance "are the great causes of "accidents of old
age," and then applied it to other ages, to infancy, and to the age 45-54. Dr.
Gibson laid stress, inter alia, upon the influence of increased sobriety. It has been
pointed out that here in London (Ann. Rep., 1917, p. 4) the most marked correspondence,
presented by mortality rates at ages, in the last 25 years, is at the extremes—
infancy and old age; and that "no theory purporting to account for the behaviour
of the mortality at the youngest ages can be complete which fails to explain the
correspondence shown to exist at the other extreme of life." The statistics certainly
justify the quotation placed at the head of Dr. Gibson's paper and they support
the contention that ''education by removing negligence and ignorance has materially
influenced mortality at the ages of comparative helplessness—childhood and
advanced age." At the same time it must of course be agreed that "increased
sobriety has beyond all doubt exercised considerable influence"; this is
unquestionably one of the operative influences through which education has
worked for good.
Thirty-seven years ago it was stated by the author of "English Sanitary
Institutions" that "over great territories of social evil, adjacent to the field of our
merely medical work, we seem to see on all sides, just as in our own province, the
common pervasion of one deep want—the want of riper national education." The
writer urged that for the prevention of Crime it was of vital importance to" recognise
the stage where crime is first mentally conceived, substitute moral influences for
influences which tend to make the will criminal; to prevent Drunkenness, he held
it necessary "to develop the reasonable minds, to which drunkenness shall have
neither charm nor excuse"; for the true prevention of Pauperism, he deemed
indispensable "the interior forces of personal character, the faculties of activity and
self control, the thrift power of labour and frugality." Of course for many a year
the motto could only be "We work in hope," but now for more than half a century