THE SCHOOL CLINIC OF TO-MORROW.

Ohinemuri Gazette, Volume XXIX, Issue 3997, 22 November 1918, Page 1

THE SCHOOL CLINIC OF TO-MORROW.

Ihe following delightful picture of what may happen, ii only the righc people get busy, now that the war is over, and do the right things, is written by Margaret M'Millan, in the London "Daily News' :— Upstairs the-e are light, fair rooms too, but, they seem at first very empty. "Where is the drug chest and the long array of bottles? And why isn't nurse putting ointment on eyes and syringing ears all the time-? Instead of doing these things' she is moving quietly about a vast circle of children who are,"it sterns, resting in easy,-chairs. 'In front of; the chairs there is a great forest of wires, and now and again the Healer becomes visible in a violent flash .of light, or audible in a dull but sharp whizzing sound that alarms nobody. 1 The children of 1930 are a new race. To begin with, they are all nurtured —that is, they are taken care of intensively and individually by skilled people. We do not recognise in them tjia poor child of yesterday. But, though one can get rid of many causes of disease in ten years, one does not necessarily get rid of all the diseases. So here is a crowd of little patients^—the straggling remnant of victims born near the close of a dark day. • It is 1930, and a fair June morning. The golden sunshine falls on thousands of city and rural homes, thousands of city garden's. Everywhere there is the rustle of young leaves, the joy of colour flaming near and about homes, schools, and nurseries; and all this colour and glow of life \s not confined to plots and parterres' and balconies. It is fairest and brightest in the faces and clothing, of happy children and fair women and girls who tend them. But down our street there is a clinic still, and there are children in it. Let us look at it and at them. It is a beautiful large building. We are no longer tempted, as free lances, to spend money on preventive work. The Ministry of Health has shouldered that work. So here is a large, light waiting room, with clean, fai L children in it —but very few. -Nearly all the patients are upstairs. There are strange cases among them, too. Here, for example, is one upon whom Sequin would have spent ten years of life and the. finest powers of his mind to effect some real but small progress! How he would have toiled to win for Charles the p wer to lace his own boofiS and to draw a triangle. Well! Look at Charles a little closer. The dim blue eyes that nsver. lightened, never smiled before, nov,» gaze at you as through a veil of darkness, and with a wondering look that somehow suggests a face seen in dreams or glancing from below clear waters. . He has arrived at last, after ten years of living death, a person who can learn to draw triangles in a week, whereas once he would have learner!, by the best methods, in a year. Lips and eyes are tremulous. He lives! He lives! The child lying next him sighs. Now he waits only for nurse. to release him, in order to use new powers. She takes away the handle bearing the live current, and he s<lips gaily behind her back and runs atilt at the man who enters. "Steady!" cries the Doctor of the new Day. I "These children are so boisterous ! when they get, the use of their limbs." , There are no baths in this clinic, I but there are a great many in homes ■ and also in schools. And here the c : is an X-ray room and a sun bath room and a roof garden and dormitory. In short, it is a new order of clinic. I Electricity, X-rays, the magnetic earth, and all its healing powers, sunlight, and science have made an end of the drug chest. "It is all a dream," cries the sceptic. "No such thing can happen." Well, it has happened already, but not for the children of mean streets. They crowd our reception rooms today, and relief work goes on apace ; but the children who were paralysed and who vyalk, who were dull and are now normal or almost normal, are here already—only not in our street. The patients who have been cured are mostly rich women, or friends of the new order of medicine, or soldiers — but not very many "soldiers. The healing work is not, yet carried on wholesale, as it will be. It has not yet occurred to our Minstreet knows what is essential ab">ut for soldiers, maimed through the wa^, could be done for children, maimed through poverty. Our legislation is piecemeal, and carried out with an amazing fidelity to law, rule, and order, and under a great many authorities, who jostle one another even at the top. It is not so much a progressive party we want—but eyes, eyes to see. What if to-morrow drugs should be given up, and even educational methods, be allowed to take a not altogether too expansive place ? I "Government" will not help. It is concerned with things that are proved already, so that the man in the isters that what, is now b~lng do tie them. But there would be nc light on the upward "path if we could nnt act without Government. If any welloff person or group of persons can spare even a little money we w'll begin—not t,o make experiments—but to cuve a few incurables in Deptford. In thisi way, and in no other, the existing school clinics began, and in this way only will they win forward into bolder and brighter reaches of service.