The national system of compulsory elementary education inaugurated in 1870 has had valuable indirect influence in promoting the public health. Apart from the beneficent effect of education, the steadily increasing pressure on children to come to school in a cleanly condition and the stimulus of emulation in tidiness and cleanliness, have done much to improve the home conditions of the people. After the South African war much attention was drawn to the large number of recruits rejected owing to physical disabilities; and an inter-departmental committee reported _inter alia_ in favour of a system of medical inspection of pupils in elementary schools, which had often been urged by hygienists. Observations made in Glasgow and Edinburgh by Leslie Mackenzie did much to draw attention to the physical defects in Scottish school children. In 1907 the Board of Education acquired power to make provision through the local education authorities for the medical inspection and treatment of school children. At first little more than inspection of pupils was undertaken, a large number of defects of sight, hearing, parasitic conditions, as well as malnutrition and actual disease being discovered. Gradually some items of treatment were undertaken at school clinics, or at hospitals or centres subsidized by the education authorities; though the amount of treatment is still small compared to the defects discovered and not otherwise treated. But there now existed in every locality three authorities concerned in the treatment of disease: 1. Poor-law guardians, treating all forms of illness in paupers, at home and in institutions. 2. Public health authorities, undertaking preventive measures against disease, and treating fevers, tuberculosis, and occasionally other diseases in institutions; and more recently providing nurses at home for certain conditions. 3. Local education authorities, concerned in treating certain ailments in school children. Centrally two government departments were supervising this work, and subsidizing it to some extent from government funds; and poor-law medical work and public health medical work were supervised by two divisions of the Local Government Board acting in almost complete isolation. More recently Parliament has permitted the Board of Education to give grants in aid of schools for mothers, and allied institutions for the care of children under school age; for which institutions, substantially, the Local Government Board in other instances was giving grants.