§ LORD ALGERNON PERCYasked the Vice President of the Committee of Council, Whether he is yet in a position to state to the House the result of his in- 86 quiries into the case of the boy Wiles, which came before the Shoreditch Board of Guardians on the 19th of March, when two doctors reported the boy to be insane, and the child's mother attributed his insanity to over-pressure at school, and stated that the boy had complained that a pupil teacher had beaten him on the head with a ruler?
§ MR. MUNDELLASir, the Committee of Inquiry appointed by the London School Board have made a Report in this case, which is so complete an answer to the Question of the noble Lord that I cannot do better than read it—
With reference to the medical aspects of the case, the Committee find as follows:—The boy was first ill on Wednesday when he came homo to dinner; the mother kept him at home from school, and gave him some domestic medical treatment, and the following morning asked a friend to go to see him, and found him in convulsions. She then sent for a doctor, and on the following (i.e., Friday) morning, the rash of scarlet fever was out. The fever appears to have progressed favourably, and in the course of the succeeding week the boy was allowed by his mother to get up. On the Monday week after the rash appeared, he went out to play in the garden —much earlier than any medical man would allow a patient with the scarlet fever to be exposed in the open air, the great danger of the disease being from catching cold. In this ease the child caught cold, and dropsy appeared the next day. Dropsy in such a case is a token of the suppression of the secretions of the kidneys, and common results of such suppression are delirium and convulsions, a great disturbance of the action of the nerve-centres. These results appear to have followed in this case, and to have cumulated into insanity at last. All the dates being taken into consideration, with the obvious mismanagement of permitting the lad to go out while actually in the midst of the fever, it appears to the deputation that there can be no reasonable doubt that the insanity which succeeded was the result of the fever and the blood poisoning which followed upon it. The lad is now so far bettor as to he home again. The deputation also come to the conclusion that there was no evidence that the boy had been struck on the head.The pupil teacher who inflicted corporal punishment, in contravention of the rules of the Board, was dismissed the service.