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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

shares the honour of being, perhaps, the greatest pioneer modern school doctor.

Nevertheless, Germany was slow to take action. She let other nations take the plunge before her. Thus, as Schubart, an eminent German school doctor, in his book Schubartzwesen points out, Brussels was the pioneer city in this work, for in 1874 she made provision for medical inspection in schools. Paris came next in 1879, Antwerp in 1882, Hungary in 1887, and Moscow in 1888.

The amount of inspection, and the nature of it, varied very much in these different places, yet they had all made a beginning of some kind before Germany or England took any practical steps at all.

Germany had a very good example of what real medical inspection can do to banish disease in her own army. During the first half of the nineteenth century 14 per thousand died in the Prussian army, and 10 per thousand of the civilians of like age. But in 1903 only 2·1 per thousand of the German army died, and among the civilians 5·2 per thousand.

"From the year 1873 to 1903," writes Hartmann, the chief school medical officer of Berlin, "the mortality of the people fell by two-thirds! In 1903 two and a half million 'sick list' days were saved,