View report page

18
Among 4,376 children who failed, 823 were treated by diastolisation treatment, and 400 of
these benefited sufficiently to enable them to pass their final test, after the completion of their
treatment. The results of 98 were unknown owing to their either having left school or lapsed
from treatment.
Among the 60,440 children tested by the gramophone audiometer, there were 80 who gave
no better response than the 18 decibel level or worse in the better ear at their final test, and who
consequently were potential cases for special educational facilities. All these were invited to
County Hall and were given a complete test, with the result that 49 were found to be suitable for
ordinary school, and these should be known as grade I children. Twenty were able to benefit
educationally in the ordinary school with special facilities such as favourable position in class;
these should be known as grade IIa children. Eleven needed education in a partially deaf school;
these should be known as grade IIb children.
The nutritional stale of the London school children
Between the sunshine of robust health and the night of disease there is a twilight
of unease. School medical officers, in virtue of their approach from the point
of view of health, have long been aware of this; practising physicians, on the other
hand, have been tardy in their recognition of the intermediate state. They have
inclined to be rather critical of the fussiness of the school doctors, and often met
the patients referred to them with assurances that there was nothing wrong or
nothing to worry about. Many a complaint has been, and still is, heard from parents
on this score. The complaints are more usually directed at the official doctor whose
"officiousness" they deplore, and whom they blame for the trouble and anxiety
caused for, supposedly, no reason. Lately, the state in which children, though not
ill are not yet perfectly fit, has received wider recognition, and is being explored
by the help of the biochemist.
The idea has emerged of latent conditions which interfere with full health,
although they may never pass over into disease. New methods of investigation are
being perfected whereby the degree of saturation or deficiency of substances necessary
for steady growth and maintenance of health can be assessed.
The children so often in the past brought to the school medical officer by anxious
parents because they exhibited excessive bruising as the result of minor injury,
now turn out to be sufferers from hypovitaminosis C. The bruising was not a sign
of ferocity on the part of the teacher or playmates, but of unwise feeding on the
part of the parent, and the degree of this deficiency is now assessed by the resistance
which the superficial blood vessels make to rupture by pressure.
Other children suffer from hypovitaminosis A, and the attempt is made to
measure this deficiency by the lag in regeneration of their visual purple under tests
for night blindness.
Such states, hitherto so difficult to recognise or even to define, appear to be
widespread in all countries.
For twenty.eight years in London, the school doctors have sought to improve
these conditions by the administration of milk, malt and cod.liver oil in school.
Perhaps to these must shortly be added other remedies as Dr. Wilfrid Oakley
suggests (pp 25.6).
Miss Kate Hogan*, writing on changes in infant schools in 50 years, says:—
Thanks to the introduction of nurses into the schools, we were able to get the children's
heads cleaner. The mothers disliked their children having to go to the cleansing station and having
their hair cut. Later came medical inspection and with it a host of hygienic benefits, such
as free feeding, the abolition of needlework in infant schools, and a wonderful improvement in
the underclothing and personal hygiene of the children. In fact, the old nightmare of malnutrition
and general neglect had become a thing of the past.
Of serious malnutrition, it is true, there is now very little, but of slighter
degrees of subnutrition there may be much, although their full significance is still
in doubt.
* The London Teacher (No. 1,000), 25th February, 1938.