MEDICALLY UNFIT.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2478, 3 June 1915, Page 6

MEDICALLY UNFIT.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —I notice in the evening paper today a remarkable statement in a roport by the Defence Department on the medical tests. It is stated: — . . The Department discussed also in its report the question of taking into the Ambulance and Army Service Corps, or clerical staffs, men who might be otherwise rejected, but they said that these departments of military work imposed more arduous strain and longer hours. The men in these tasks had to be fitter, physioally, if anything, rather than the ■reverse. If anything, the regulations were not stringent enough for these services, and steps were being taken to make them more so,

If this is a fair statement of the contents of the report, it is evidence of a lamentable lack of ordinary common sense in the official who drafted it. Take my own case, for I fulfill the requirements of the test in every way except that my sight, though normal with glasses, has a ~slightly greater error of refraction without them than is prescribed by the sacrosanct A rmy Regulations. During the past fifteen years I have done more prolonged close work with my eyes, without ill effect, than probably any clerk in the Defence Department during the same period of time. Yet according to this amazing report I should be, even more useless for clerical work, etc., than I should be for the firing line, though I undertake to say I would givo as good an account of myself there as many a man who lias been passed. The other day I heard of a man who'bad run regularly in the harriers being thrown out because of a bent big toe. This defect presumably renders him useless even as a clerk. Is it not time than common sense was substituted for rod-tape?— Wellington, June 2, 1915.