The health of the school child / by W. Leslie Mackenzie.

  • Leslie Mackenzie
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The health of the school child / by W. Leslie Mackenzie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    129/178 (page 117)
    In the great mass of cases the children showed good marks of primary vaccination. In many cases, particularly those vaccinated in the town of Wiesbaden, there were six good marks—three on each arm. Four good marks were the rule. In one child, who had come from Switzerland, there was no mark. In one or two, the marks were indifferent. Of the seventy children, seven showed no reaction on re-vaccination. They were certified accordingly, and would come up again in the following year. One could not but be impressed with the pre- cision, simplicity, quietness of the whole proceeding. The children were all clean and well-nourished. None of them, either on their own behalf or on their parents’ behalf, offered any objection. The most scrupulous care was taken to prevent infection, and in no single case was there a “ bad arm ” either from accidental infection or from the specific action of lymph. This was a decisive testimony at once to the thoroughness of the primary vaccination and to the asepticity of the re-vaccination. I append a translation of directions issued to the parents. If it be said that the orderliness of these and the other proceedings of German school children is due to the predominance of military discipline, I am not concerned to deny the fact. But I have formed the impression that if military discipline predominates in the civil life of Germany, it is because it finds in the German character a suitable medium. Probably the military system is as much an expression of the German sense of order as a