Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/209

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THE SCHOOL DOCTOR AT HOME
183

only after a year has passed, and when many ailing children have gone forth to enter on their life struggle in bad health. Occasionally to be sure a man may make a study of one group of schools or of a single neighbourhood; but the City is vast, the time of nearly all the school doctors is but a fragment (they are not all, as we saw, whole-timers—most of them are men in ordinary practice, giving a part of their time to this work), and all the schools have to receive a visit. No zeal or ability could make such work bear great practical results in so far as the children seen are concerned.

In provincial cities the position is a little different. Take Bradford for example. There the school doctor has to take a general oversight of forty thousand children! By dint of labour he can see every class in every school more than once a year. One cannot deny that something may be done by such medical inspection of forty thousand children. But can any one pretend that all these children are safeguarded? that all receive treatment? or that the condition of of each can be learned and taken account of?

Nevertheless, good work has been done in England. One may go further and say that work has been done here of a kind that is not yet even attempted in Germany. In reading the accounts of the German