But medical inspection does not confine itself to dealing with contagious disease. Its aid has been invoked to help the child who is backward in his school studies. With the recent extensions in the length of the school term and the increase in the number of years of schooling demanded of the child, has come a great advance in the standards of the work required. When the standards were low, the work was not beyond the capacity of even the weaker children; but with close grading, fuller courses, higher standards, and constantly more insistent demands for intellectual attainment, conditions have changed. Pupils have been unable to keep up with their classes. The terms "backward," "retarded," and "exceptional," as applied to school children, have been added to the vocabularies of educators.

School men discovered that the drag-net of compulsory education was bringing into school hundreds of children who were unable to keep step with their companions, and because this interfered with the orderly administration of the school system, they began to ask why the children were backward.

The school physicians helped to find the answer when they showed that hundreds of these children were backward simply because of removable physical defects. And then came the next great forward step, the realization that children are not dullards through the will of an inscrutable Providence, but rather through the law of cause and effect.