ABSTRACT
The most accessible source for the history of school child health during the period is the annual reports of the School Medical Service (SMS) and the Ministry of Health (MH), all of which were optimistic in their recording of mortality and morbidity statistics, as were the majority of local reports submitted by Medical Officers of Health (MOH). In his report for 1932, for example, Newman (who was both Chief Medical Officer (CMO) to the Board of Education and, from 1920, Chief Medical Officer to the Ministry of Health) claimed that for the first time no English or Welsh county borough recorded an infant death rate of above 100. In later reports he wrote of the ‘spectacular improvement’ that had occurred over the years, so that the rate had reached its ‘irreducible minimum’.1
