[Report 1936] / Medical Officer of Health, Dundee City.

  • Dundee (Scotland). City Council.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1936] / Medical Officer of Health, Dundee City. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “ Child Guidance is carried out by a group of specialists, who work closely together, realising that success must depend upon winning the confidence and active help of the families concerned, who can then be guided in solving their own problem. “ Only this plan of ‘ helping people to help themselves ’ will produce definite and lasting results. Such treatment means that much time must be spent by the workers upon each case, but every one of experience knows that the mere giving of advice, however expert, is not enough to solve difficulties. Careful and patient work is required to enable people to alter, both inwardly and outwardly, their attitudes and behaviour.” The following paragraphs represent the principal contents of Orthoptic a special report which was issued by me on the need for special centre.'B facilities for the treatment of squint. The recommendations con- tained in this report have been agreed to, and the Orthoptic Train- ing Centre will probably be established sometime during the pre- sent year. The Deputy Medical Officer of Health (Pre-School and School Medical Services) and the Consulting Ophtholmologist, School Medical Services, have recently been considering the possibility of providing more complete treatment facilities for school children and pre-school children discovered at clinics and in the course of routine inspection to be suffering from squint. The correction of squint in a child is highly important, as such a condition interferes seriously with efficiency, the child being handicapped not only during school years, but during later life. In many cases of squint the vision in the squinting eye becomes so defective that the eye has to be classified as a blind one. Not only this, the child loses the power of stereoscopic vision, that is, the ability to judge depth, and is thus heavily handicapped in wage- earning capacity. The Deputy Medical Officer of Health (Pre-School and School Medical Services) when making his report to the Ministry of Labour on a prospective candidate for juvenile employment, has frequently to recommend in cases of squint that the candidate should not enter an occupation involving eyestrain or requiring manipulative skill. Admission to many of the public services is necessarily debarred to numbers of candidates who have defective vision in one eye owing to an old squint.