Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/104

86 viz. in which position of the Copy Book does the child adopt the best bodily posture, endangering or unduly burdening no organ? The most gratifying unanimity prevails with the whole body of investigators on the fact, that all right positions of the Copy Book are thoroughly injurious and utterly to be rejected.

For: They compel the head to turn to the right, the shoulders follow more or less, the right arm slips on the desk to the right and to a certain degree downwards, the left arm is pushed up causing the shoulder to rise, the right sinks, the spinal column loses its upright posture and assumes a bending towards the left, the body–to which this wearisome distortion becomes in the long run uncomfortable–collapses more and more, the lateral bending is accompanied by a similar one forward, and the head, approaching the writing in a way extremely threatening for the eye, even sinks down upon the left arm which is pushed before the middle of the body.

Beginnings of this bodily distortion are found in every child who adopts the right position of Copy Book, and in the majority of cases the result is really wonderfully Cramped postures, on which the stamp of danger to health is unmistakeably imprinted.

There are two organs in particular which are distressed by this, the Spinal Column and the eye, as we have seen in a previous chapter, for according to Dr. A. Baginsky amongst 1000 cases of crooked growth 887 or 88.7 per cent. took their rise between the ages of six and fourteen. Dr. Mayer found that the faulty posture of body, most frequently observed in the case of children writing with right position of Copy Book, exactly corresponded to the permanent distortions which were most common in those very school classes, viz. the C-shaped bend of the whole spinal column towards the left.

Dr. Schenk (“The Actiology of Scoliose” Berlin 1885), with instruments of very exact action examined and measured 200 children, with the result that 160 were found to sit at the writing so that they displaced the upper body opposite the pelvis towards the left, manifestly in order to convert, for the sake of easier production of sloping writing, the original middle position of the Copy Book into