ABSTRACT
The disclosures of poverty of Booth, Rowntree, and others had had little direct effect in government circles. More disturbing to Whitehall had been the admission by the Director-General of the Army Medical Service during the Boer War that the Inspector of Recruiting was having great difficulty in obtaining sufficient men of satisfactory physique for service in the forces: over the whole country, 38 per cent of volunteers were rejected for heart afflictions, poor sight and hearing, and bad teeth, and this despite a reduction in the· minimum height for recruits to five feet. It was these fears, grounded upon concern for national safety rather than personal health, which led to the appointment of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration and the beginning of some remedial action. A growing concern for the health of children, fortified by the complaints of teachers that hungry scholars were uneducable, led to the passing of the Education Act (Provision of Meals) in 1906 and the Medical Inspection Act in 1907.2 By the outbreak of war some 200,000 children were benefiting from free meals, and many were receiving medical and dental treatment at school clinics. Mothers, too, were learning important lessons about the rearing of children through the activities of infant welfare centres which had started on a voluntary basis in St Pancras in 1907: by 1914 there were a hundred or more centres now receiving grants from the Local Government Board.3 Another significant development was the establishment in
1913 of the Medical Research Committee, a body formed with government support to investigate the nature and causes of disease. It had barely begun a major study of rickets when war broke out.
