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48 [1910
preventable. Five out of every thousand infants born died from tuberculosis,
mainly induced by feeding or conditions that were preventable. But they have
not been pi evented because there is nobody to instruct the poor unfortunate
mothers to whom a baby is as great a puzzle as a complicated piece of
mechanism is to a child. It is in the poorer class neighbourhoods, where
education is lacking, where illiteracy most abounds, that we find the greatest
infant mortality. Investigations everywhere have proved this beyond doubt,
and it is, therefoie, in such districts that the instruction of mothers is most
urgently necessary. If we ask ourselves which are the worst districts in this
respect in Islington, the answer will be at once forthcoming:—Lower Holloway
and Barnsbury. And if we examine the records we will find that they are
the two districts in which the infantile mortality rate is at its highest, 1415 per
1,000 births in Lower Holloway, and 130 in Barnsbury, as compared with 120
in the rest of the borough during the eight years 1902-1909. Of course there
are more factors at work than the ill-feeding of the infants to cause these
differences in the mortality, but if enquiry be made they will be found to arise
from ignorance—ignorance of that elementary principle of sanitation, the need
of cleanliness, which is next to Godliness, and Order, Heaven's first law. It
is not too much to say that if the necessity for practising these two vital
doctrines were instilled into the minds of mothers, apart altogether from
methods of feeding and of suitable foods, much good would result. The
mothers, and the young mothers especially, want to be reached by some agency,
which all thoughtful persons consider should be trained visitors under the
control of a public authority.
There is one point that is too often forgotten by persons who have the
management of infant children, and by those holding public positions such as
memberships in local sanitary authorities, which is that the prevention of
infantile mortality and the feeding and rearing of infant children are inextricably
united, for it is unfortunately a fact that improper feeding leads to many of the
ills which are made very visible in the later life of the child. Malnutrition, it
is quite true, frequently kills children, but not always, and when it does not, it
too often leaves them so damaged and so deformed as to be life-long burdens to
society, and who, if they are not able to do som - kind of light work—they never
can perform any of a heavy nature—are left to be taken care of either by the
charitably disposed or by the Poor Law Authorities of the country. Let us
take only one example, that of Rickets, which is frequently produced by insufficient
and improper food, i.e., which does not afford the proper and necessary