Only in the last few years has the law required every child attending an
elementary school to be physically examined on entering and leaving and,
therefore, statistics on the health of school children in England are
only now available. About a million and a half children are now examined
annually. The report of Sir George Newman, chief medical officer of the
Board of Education for 1911, has just been issued. It shows the
condition of 186,652 children in thirteen counties and sixteen urban
areas and is far from satisfactory. Only in one urban area did the
percentage of “good” nutrition reach 45, and from this figure it ranged
down as low as 3.8. Of 200,000 children examined in London more than
half were found to be defective and over 78,000 were recommended for
treatment. According to this report the malnutrition is due in the great
majority of cases to ignorance of the relative value of foodstuffs and
the means of using them economically, and only in the minority to
poverty. About .5 per cent of the children are feeble-minded and of
these about one-seventh are of such low grade as to be uneducable.