Papers on school hygiene : [...] the fourth International Congress on school hygiene, Buffalo 1913 / published by the Royal Swedish Committee.

Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Papers on school hygiene : [...] the fourth International Congress on school hygiene, Buffalo 1913 / published by the Royal Swedish Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    16/50 (page 12)
    to that discrepancy it is to be noted that at the investigations which form the basis of Key’s calculations the pupils’ two eyes were tested together, and thus those who were short-sighted in only one eye were not included. Now if I exclude from my statistics those who were short-sighted in one eye only, I obtain 47 % i. e. a figure which pretty nearly agrees with Key’s. In any case there is nothing in my investigations which tends to show that his figures were too high.1 I have endeavoured to control the most recent figures, those for 1905, in the following way: The total number of pupils in all the State secondary schools for boys in Sweden amounted in the year 1904 to 20,131; among them, according to the tests conducted by school medi- cal officers, 18*8 % of those in the two highest forms were short-sighted. Since it seldom occurs that anyone begins to be short-sighted after having left school at the age of 18 or 19, short-sightedness amongst stu- dents at university colleges or similar establishments must be approxi- mately as widespread as in the highest form of the secondary schools. A test of short-sightedness, therefore, among students, especially fresh- men, must, one would think, serve as a check on the statistics compiled respecting the test carried out by the school medical officers. With this idea in my mind 1 tested, in the autumn of 1908, a number of medical students at the Caroline (Karolinska) Medical Institute in Stockholm, some of them engaged in working in the chemical laboratory, some doing dissecting-work, and others training to become dental surgeons. Dr. Akerblom, Assistant at the Eye Clinical Hospital, also tested the medical students studying there during the autumn term of the same year. The total number of those thus examined was 111, and of these 21, i. e. 18-9 % were found to be short-sighted. Here also the figures agree fairly closely with those given by the school medical officers for the highest form of the State secondary schools (18*8).2 I give below a graphic Chart of the decrease in short-sightedness in Swedish secondary schools for boys during the period 1883—1905 inclu- sive. For the first-mentioned year I have taken the figures given by Key, being the results of his test in 10 boys’ schools, which moreover yield the lowest average of any obtained at that date with tests carried out by medical men and by exact methods. The figures for 1895 to 1905 are taken from the Swedish Official Statistics. 1 I may point out that in my investigations astigmatism was also taken account of and that I made extensive controlling tests with the optic mirror besides. 2 Figures respecting short-sightedness in medical students in 1908 are not inappreciably lower than those I obtained from my test in 1903. At that time the percentage for those doing dissecting and laboratory work was 28, and that for those working in the eye clin- ical hospital was 34. The explanation of that change is evidently to be looked for in the circumstance that all, or practically all, who were examined in 1903 had been on the class- ical side at school, whereas since then the obligatory study of Latin for prospective medi- cal students has been removed, so that nowadays many medicals come from the modern side.