The need of medical inspection of school children in Ireland

Abstract

of the children. Every civilised country but our own has its school children medically inspected. Since 1874 Brussels had a systematic medical inspection of schools, and Paris since 1884. There are scientific journals in France and Germany devoted exclusively to the subject of this movement, which is also a national one in Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Argentine Republic, Japan, and England. In this country the fight will be more difficult, because we cannot count on parents demanding that their children's health should be protected during the long hours of their schooling. In Ireland the parents, we will not say out of apathy (for apathy is an unhappy word in the face of so much pathology), but out of ignorance and the patience born of ignorance, have come to take it for granted that certain diseases are inseparable from child life, and " the sooner they are over the better." Measles, scarlatina, whooping-cough, and diphtheria must be "got shut of" before a child has cleared the decks for active warfare with the world. Each and every one of these diseases can and should be prevented. But these are diseases which make themselves manifest, diseases with a reputation that whenever they come in epidemic form result, in this country, in closing the schools. There is a far more common and chronic disease which is not at all generally recognised, which besets a great proportion of school children, which exercises unobtrusively its 12