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23
A careful consideration of all the facts, however, leaves me
unshaken in the view that the main general results are a reliable
expression of average medical opinion on the conditions
recorded. The anomalies to which I have referred are so exceptional
as to leave the general soundness of the results but
little affected. To speak figuratively, a strange team has been employed
to do work in which uniform results are to be desired. 1 he
pulling on the whole has been good, and the progress measured
in the gross results is not less certain because here and there
one of the team has fallen out of step or on occasion ceased to
pull. With further experience I do not doubt the discipline will
improve, and the flaws and blemishes that mar the first essays
will disappear.
HEALTHINESS OF WILLESDEN CHILDREN.
Most of the Assistant School Medical Officers have expressed
themselves as struck with the general healthiness and good
physical condition of the children, and with the comparative
absence of serious disease among them.
I do not doubt when comparison with the results in other
towns is possible, that Willesden children will take a place
accordant with what available comparative vital statistics would
lead one to expect, namely, one high in the scale that measures
the national health. Willesden has few slums, and although for
the greater part it consists of a better working class population,
it is one living on the whole under satisfactory sanitary conditions.
Nevertheless, the tale told by the results of medical inspection is
not so rosy or by any means so satisfactory as the recurring
examination of a large number of healthy children must naturally
suggest to the observer. Apart from the acute diseases of childhood,
in the discovery of which systematic medical inspection can
play but an insignificant part, the affections of childhood are
chiefly of an incipient character. They are on this account of
more importance from the point of view of preventive medicine
than the grosser lesions, which are past repair.