Discoveries of medicine: distortions and diseases.—The first science, indeed, to penetrate into the school was medicine, which organized a special hygiene for the occasion, a kind of Red Cross service. The most interesting part of the hygiene that penetrates into schools was that which diagnosed and described the "diseases of school children," that is to say, the maladies contracted solely as a result of study in school. The most prevalent of these maladies are spinal curvature and myopia. The first is caused by excessive sitting, and by the injurious position of the shoulders in writing. The second arises from the fact that in the spot where the child has to remain seated, there is not sufficient light for him to see clearly; or this spot is too far from the blackboard, or from the places where the child has to read, and the prolonged effort of accommodation induces myopia. Other minor generalized maladies were also described: an organic debility so widely diffused that hygiene prescribed as an ideal treatment a gratuitous distribution of cod-liver oil or of reconstituent remedies in general to all pupils. Anemia, liver complaints, and neurasthenia were also studied as school diseases.
Thus a new field was opened to hygiene in connection with the most fertile source of professional disease, and reading and writing were carefully studied in relation to pedagogical methods, and in relation to spinal curvature and defective refraction of the eyes.
The figure of the child, that victim of unsuitable and disproportionate work, was not hereby brought into strong relief, as might have been expected, by the aid of medicine, but a new branch of "legal medicine" came into being. It was, indeed, medicine which drew attention to the diseases and deaths of the victims in orphan asylums, victims of artificial or irrational feeding, in conjunction with wet nursing; it was medicine which passed in review one by one all those individual cases which proclaim this legal fact: children have no civil rights. Medicine now entered into another sphere where the victims were not "cases," but the generality, the child-population in its entirety; and now it is the law itself which imposes duties upon them, and condemns them en masse to labor for many years in a manner which entails physical torture. If a branch of legal medicine has arisen in connection with criminals, how is it that none should ever have arisen in connection with the innocent?
Science has not fulfilled its mission in its dealings with children.—Medicine has confined itself to the treatment of diseases artificially produced. It has diagnosed a cause of disease and left this cause undisturbed, content merely to alleviate the resultant evils befalling a multitude of victims. It has not taken up the attitude proper to its great and dignified rôle of "protector" of life; it has merely come forward, like the Red Cross Service during war, to heal the wounded and alleviate the condition of the suffering; it has not considered that the authority it enjoys as the guardian of health would enable it to utter the supreme cry of peace, putting an end to a war so dangerous, unjust, and inhuman.
As, in its struggle against microbes, it was the standard-bearer in the most glorious of victories over death, so, fighting directly against the causes of the impoverishment of generations, it might have aspired to bear the banner of protector of posterity. Instead of this, it confined itself to the elaboration of a branch of study that mimics science: school hygiene; thus making itself the accomplice of a social wrong.
Let us glance into a recent treatise of school hygiene, which merely sums up the ideas and the work of the world at large:
"We will briefly indicate the conditions favorable to the development of spinal curvature. The age when the malady usually appears is that of second infancy, hence its name of spinal curvature of the adolescent; spinal curvature caused by rickets, which appears in early childhood, is rarer, and is of less direct interest to us here. The commonest cause, and that on which our attention should be primarily concentrated, is the vicious attitude adopted by the majority of our pupils during their school work; this cause is so universal that we may call spinal curvature the professional disease of the pupil. Doctor Legendre, in a formula which may be judged over-severe, though unhappily it is only too well-founded, said of our schools that they are factories for the production of the deformed and the myopic.
"The main cause of myopia is to be found in the very conditions under which children are gathered together in schools: insufficiency of light, the over-small type common in school-books, the frequent use of the blackboard, on which the teacher is not always careful to make the size of the characters he traces proportionate to the distance at which they have to be read, are so many causes of ocular fatigue. The visual keenness of a given eye, says Doctor Leprince, decreases rapidly when the intensity of the light falls below a certain limit. The pupil, working with insufficient light, repairs the defective keenness of which this is the cause, by increasing the visual angle under which the details of the object he is looking at appear to him; in other words, he brings that object inordinately close to him.
"The time necessary to recognize a given letter increases greatly, when the limit of visual acuteness has been reached. Therefore, insufficient light would tend to make work slower, unless the pupil increased acuteness by approaching the object more closely. Thus myopia constitutes a positive adaptation to the defective conditions of work, enabling the pupil to work more rapidly." [6]