2. The length of the leg, taken from below the knee, when the child is seated with the legs at right-angles to the thighs, and the feet flat on the ground. This measurement gives the required height of the seat from the foot-rest.
3. The diameter of the body from front to back, taken from the sternum; this, with five centimeters added to it, gives the proper distance from the reading-desk to the back of the seat.
4. The length of the femur, two-thirds of which represent the depth of the seat.
5. Finally, the height of the epigastric cavity above the seat, augmented by a few centimeters, indicates the height of the reading-desk.
We may add that in view of the rapid growth of the child, these measurements should be taken twice in the course of the school year, and children should be made to change places in accordance with these measurements.
There is a little crustacean which, coming naked into the world, chooses an empty shell and adapts itself thereto; when it grows larger and the shell becomes too tight, it sallies forth and takes up its abode in a larger one. This the creature does of its own accord, without a savant to measure it or a teacher to choose a new shell for it. But to us and to scientists, a child is inferior to this lowly invertebrate!
The difficulty of keeping forty or fifty children motionless for hours in the prescribed hygienic attitude, and of finding desks exactly adapted to these growing bodies, makes this remedy impracticable, so hunchbacks continue among us. The problem remains unsolved.
Hence it has been deemed more practical to establish a kind of orthopædic institution within the building itself in certain model schools in Rome. It consists of a costly and elaborate apparatus, to which the pupils come in turn to be suspended by the head after the method adopted in medicine to combat spinal curvature in Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the vertebral column) and rickets.
Healthy children, as well as the unsound, suffer by these applications; but on the other hand, the results afford encouraging statistics. If this hanging treatment be initiated regularly at the age of six years it strikes a perfect balance with the injury caused by prolonged deterioration induced by school desks, and children are delivered from spinal disease.