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39
Total number of cases of refraction errors including
cases suffering from squint 563
Total No. of cases provided with glasses 543
AURAL CLINIC.
I am indebted to Mr. F. P. M. Clarke (Aural Surgeon) for the
following report:—
"The two sessions a week at the Aural Clinic, Municipal
Health Centre, Park Lane, were fully occupied during the year
1943. Most of the children evacuated at the beginning of
hostilities had returned and the regular school medical inspection
which provides the majority of cases seen at the clinic, was
able to carry on its normal routine examinations without
interruption, thus keeping the clinic fully occupied. The
total number of new cases seen actually exceeded that of the
immediate pre-war years.
"It is gratifying to note here the very good attendance of
those referred for courses of special treatment, as under existing
circumstances it must be fairly difficult and inconvenient for
many of the parents to fit in the requisite number of attendances.
To meet this difficulty, to some extent, one of the two weekly
clinics was arranged for the afternoon and the other for the
morning, instead of, as previously, the two in the mornings.
This arrangement considerably convenienced many of the
parents.
"There has been a marked rise in the number of pre-school
children referred to the clinic for examination and subsequent
treatment. This is a progressive step the importance of which
cannot be too strongly impressed. The earlier an ear, nose or
throat defect is treated, the easier and more certain it is to
effect a permanent cure. And it is by the careful examination
of these young children and infants by experienced school
medical officers that most of these early affections are discovered.
In the majority of cases they are not at all noticeable to the
parents, at least as of any serious importance—just regarded
as a passing 'ailment'—and allowed to drift into a chronic
intractable form of permanent disability. It was a regular
practice at all the leading Welfare Clinics in Paris before the
war, to give each child a course of intranasal massage or Diastolisation