[Report 1931] / Medical Officer of Health and School Medical Officer of Health, Swindon Borough.
- Swindon (Wiltshire, England). Borough Council.
- Date:
- 1931
Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Credit: [Report 1931] / Medical Officer of Health and School Medical Officer of Health, Swindon Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![CONCLUSION Some of the foregoing remarks touch upon controvert questions intentionally, for no social function achieves its purpose unless it is fused with all others for the single object of improving the condition of mankind. There is no line of separation between school medicine and education on the one hand and between it and epidemiology and communal hygiene on the other, so it is madness to try to limit it as a service which can stand by itself. The school medical officer is, or should be, a biologist and upon all matters which come before him he should exercise his biological conception. This is widely different from attending merely to anatomical or pathological details. The strictly medical part of school medicine receives adequate attention, so in most places, including Swindon, there is no excuse for any child having a remediable defect to remain unrelieved, though we are not always quite certain that the “remedy” is the best form of management. The public still thinks that there is a line of demarkation between health and disease, and the expressions in common use tend to keep alive this fallacy. To speak of a person “catching fever or “having a tumour,” or suffering from a headache,” suggests that the fever, tumour, and headache are entities, functions that can be separated, defined, and measured. But they have no corporate existence, they are merely states of physiological dis¬ harmony, inseparable from and coincident with the organism. Medical treatment is a method of interfering with this disharmony to relieve certain end results of disordered function and is mere.lv L' ail adjunct to biological management. To the biologist, education is a form of nutrition, bearing intimately upon the process of development. Training, which is included under education and is often confused with it, is merely a convenient way of learning tricks, of concern to the biologist only in as far that the ability to learn and utilise the specific tricks with profit and without detriment depends largely upon the possession of appropriate sense organs. It is probable that true education may affect inheritance, it is certain that training has no value except to the individual. Ileal progress will only come about by considering the child and his environment as a space-time event, inseparable from the past, the future and the contemporary events which make up the space-time slice of evolution in which he passes big corporate existence as an automatic, but not strictly definable, unit. This sounds difficult, but organic beings are difficult and cannot fie treated piecemeal like the furniture in a room. They cannot b«u| separated from their environment, for they coincide with it. Thy food man eats and what be does, and what is done to him arc as much a part of him as are bis lungs, or his tonsils. That parti] which is most nearly individualistic'—his physical struct lire'—-isH](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30152318_0177.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
