The Posture of School Children, With its Home Hygiene and New Efficiency Methods for School Training
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
- Author:
Jessie H. Bancroft. New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1913. Pp. xii-f-327.
Since “the posture of the spine, chest, and shoulders throughout the growing period influences profoundly their ultimate contours and proportions,” the carriage of the body during school life, Miss Bancroft demonstrates, is an important factor in the efficiency as well as the beauty of the individual. For here as elsewhere, beauty and efficiency go hand in hand. Since the archaic beginnings of art, sculptors and painters have delighted in representing the erect, finelypoised, exultant human figure; but medicine has come very slowly to an understanding of the truth which has so long been axiomatic in art. It is only in the last decade, as Miss Bancroft points out, that physicians have undertaken to study the behavior of the internal organs under varying conditions of bodily attitude. Indeed it was as recently as 1909 that Dr Joel E. Goldthwaite and Dr Lloyd T. Brown published their paper, “The Relation of Posture to Human Efficiency and the Influence of Poise upon the Support and Function of the Viscera,”?a paper which Miss Bancroft pronounces “indispensable to the technical worker and adapted also to popular reading.”
In discussing the posture of school children, Miss Bancroft has behind her an experience as assistant director of physical training in the public schools of New York City, and the authorship of two or three other books. She approaches her subject from every possible angle, and leaves no point untaken which could add to the strength and thoroughness of her treatment. There are no “loose ends” in her book. One cannot praise too warmly the masterly way in which she has organized her material, and the convincing clearness of her style. The illustrations are numerous and excellent, and the bibliography of 170 titles comes marvelously near perfection.
It would be unfair to disparage Miss Bancroft’s splendid book by calling it optimistic, yet it raises a hope, a dream, and a vision. If the children of today should all acquire habits of erect postuie, walking with heads up and feet straight forward, is it too much to expect, that thirty years hence we shall see but rarely upon American streets a middle-aged man or woman with sunken chest, pendulous abdomen, and flat feet? Some there will no doubt always be, victims of accident, or unusual hardship or a childhood spent under difficulties in a foreign country, but these unfortunates will be looked upon with the thoughtful pity which is the due of cripples. They will certainly not make up so large a proportion as they do now, of the people who once passed through the public schools. A. T. (198)
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