Presidential address on strain : delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Ipswich Medical Society / by Sir Lauder Brunton.

  • Brunton, Thomas Lauder, Sir, 1844-1916.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Presidential address on strain : delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Ipswich Medical Society / by Sir Lauder Brunton. 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.

    19/23 page 15
    schoolboys. What I should like to do is to guard against over-exercise and strain. In football there is much greater exertion for a short time, and with some boys the strain might be too much for them, but I do not think this is likely to be anything like so great as the long-continued strain of a very long race. In our public schools great attention is paid to games, and the training the boys thus get—bodily, mentally, and morally—is, I think, of the greatest value, but I am inclined to think that it would be a good thing if this were supplemented by exercises which would develop them equally all round. In the University of Pennsylvania the students on entering have to pass a physical examination, and the professor of physical training notes their weak points and arranges exercise for them so as to produce an equal development throughout the body. The strong points he leaves to take care of themselves. I had once a long con- versation with Professor Hueppe of Prague, who is not only a scientific man of great eminence, but a great athlete, and his opinion was that in Germany they had too many exer- cises and too few games ; that in England we had too many games and too few exercises ; that the ideal of development was to be gained by a mixture of the two. Rejection op Recruits : Need of Physical Training. But there is another section of the community in which physical training is badly wanted. Around a football match we may see several thousands of men who have collected to watch the play, but who are themselves sadly deficient in physical development. At the time of the Boer War two out of every five who presented themselves as recruits were either rejected at once or within less than two years for physical deficiency, and it was stated in the Evening Standard of Jan. 24th this year that something like one-third of the men in London who present themselves for enlistment in the Territorial Force have to be rejected owing to some physical defect. The most important defect apparently is that in vision, and this I think is due in great measure to early over-straining of the eyes. The proportion of Germans who suffer from shortsightedness is very great, and this I know has been attributed to the strain on the eyes caused by the German characters, both printed and written, and in scientific works the Roman characters are now generally employed. One of the most striking examples of strain on the ciliary muscle that I have ever seen was a patient who came from South Africa to consult me because he supposed he had a tumour in his brain. He was a man in active business, and was able, he said, to read his account books for four or five minutes, and then every- thing seemed to spin round and he could not see the figures any more. I examined him very carefully and found
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3