[Report 1910] / Medical Officer of Health, Norwich City & County.

  • Norwich (England). City & County Council.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1910] / Medical Officer of Health, Norwich City & County. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/88 (page 14)
    During the last seven weeks of the year a Dental Institution for the treatment of the teeth of school children was opened by the Authority at 60, Chapel Field Road, and 333 children’s teeth received treatment. This institution is working very satisfactorily, and is doing valuable service to the community, Mr. L. K. Percy, l.d.s., the dentist, being not only a thoroughly competent officer, but also one much liked by the children. He examines the children in the schools and treats them at the institution later. Inspection of children gathered for one purpose, viz., education? in the schools, has been very successfully utilized for another, viz., testing and incidentally standardizing the national healthiness at the school-going age, at any rate among the attendants at our elementary schools ; with results that have already fully warranted the experiment and lead one to hope that this beginning will prove to be but the starting point of a rationalized system of medical inspection of the whole growing population from infancy to adolescence. It is certainly a glaring anomaly medically to inspect children only after the commencement op school life, and to make no provision for their inspection during the vitally important years, which intervene between their biith and the commencement of their education —using that much abused word with the conventional meaning. The inspection of every child at least once a year from infancy to adolescence is the goal to look forward to. Its enforcement should certainly provide us with an efficient means of correcting and minimizing, if it be not possible to eradicate, defects and dis¬ abilities. It is preventive work of the most practical type, and should prove of inestimable value to us as a people. From an epidemological standpoint the principal characteristic of the year under review has been the persistence of Scarlet Fever in considerable amount; occasionally, and in limited areas, the disease became epidemic. The great difficulty we have in con¬ trolling this disease arises from two causes—(a) doubt as to real originating cause, and (b) the extreme mildness of the disease in a great number of the cases. A fairly severe attack of Scarlet