Social medicine studies based on civilian medical board records. IV. Occupational and physical characteristics of men with certain digestive disorders.

In a large sample of wartime Civilian Medical Board (C.M.B. passim) records it was found that I 2 per cent. of the men examined were unfit for military service because of a peptic ulcer, and a fur0'25 per cent. because of other digestive disorders (Stewart, Webb, and Hewitt, 1955a). In addition to this loss of manpower at the screening stage there was a further heavy loss from the same causes among men accepted for military service: peptic ulcer ranked second only to psychiatric disorder as a reason for discharge from the army (War Office, 1948). Thus digestive disorders caused more serious disability than any of the other disease groups so far dealt with in this series (foot defects, varicosities, and skin diseases). In some ways this means that peptic ulcer is less suitable for study through massed medical records. The condition may, for example, make a patient lose weight or change his job, so that it becomes difficult, in a statistical analysis, to distinguish between cause and effect. Despite this difficulty it was felt that an analysis of the peptic ulcer records both by occupation and by physique could be of value, provided the results were interpreted with caution. To this study has been added a similar analysis of other types of dyspepsia and of appendicitis.