Health Bulletin for leachers

Out of Old Fields, New Corn

H™: our health?” is the question that naturally arises in dis-
cussing the preliminary findings of the medical examinations
made so far under the Selective Service Act of 1940. This question is
highlighted to an extraordinary degree by the fact that the findings of
the World War draft examinations were the spur that quickened the
tempo of the child health movement in 1918. To many public-spirited
people the situation revealed by the 1917-1918 examinations was intoler-
able. Here were more than a million young men—about one third of
the nearly four million called in the draft—who were unfit for general
military service because of physical defects, many of which were pre-
ventable and traceable to the period of childhood. It made little
difference that the majority of these defects did not interfere seriously
with useful careers in civilian life, but only unfitted men for the rigors
of military life. Not passable health, but “radiant and abundant’
health was considered to be the birthright of every young American.

Men and women in those days thought they had finished the job which
now must be done again, and believed in the peace which has now been
broken. And so with the faith that the scientific knowledge then avail-
able might be applied to bring children to healthy manhood and woman-
hood, not primarily for the sake of success in war but for success and
happiness i in times of peace, the newly founded Child Health Organiza-
tion of America working in cooperation with the United States Bureau
of Education raised that early cry of “Health! Strength! Joy!”
which, with bitter irony, has since been twisted to the purpose of mis-
guided men who seem to value youthful strength and enthusiasm only
as instruments for destruction.

Beginning in 1918, pioneer efforts to improve the health of school
children were expanded into a nationwide program for the improvement
of the school environment, for the provision of school health services,
and for the transfusion of health instruction with a new and vigorous
appeal to the children’s own interests. During the Children’s Year
inaugurated in 1918 by the United States Children’s Bureau, infants
and preschool children all over the country were weighed, medeured,
and examined by physicians and found wanting to an alarming degree.
As a result, both in volunteer and official quarters, the machinery was
set in motion for child health centers, well-baby clinics or conferences,
prenatal and postnatal clinics, the expansion of public health nursing,

 

 

 

 

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Vol. XIII, No. 1 SEPTEMBER 1941