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13
Diarrhoea in such homes only one of those infants had been breast-fed,
the others receiving artificial food, often in the form of condensed
milk The number of houses visited was sixty-two and in fifty-two of
these the parents occupied only three rooms or less. What impressed one
most was the circumstance that ignorant artificial feeding and the bad
provision for the storage of food were mainly responsible for the
mortality, and that perhaps the bad air (unavoidable in the limited
accommodation possessed by the parents) was a contributing factor. The
only means of storing food adopted in forty-five out of the sixty-two
dwellings investigated was either a cupboard or a safe in a living
room, and in seven cases the food was simply placed upon the shelves
of a living room.
Zymotic Diarrhoea and the allied conditions which carry off
infants in great numbers are very largely dirt diseases, and there is no
doubt that the storage of food in crowded living rooms, which under
the circumstances of their occupation cannot possibly be kept very
clean, leads to a considerable contamination of the milk and other foool
given to the infants, and is in no small measure responsible for the
higher mortality amongst the infants living under these conditions.
Increased efforts will be made in the Borough in the future to
secure improved arrangements for storing the food in these tenemented
dwellings.
The circumstance that at present one child out of every five born
succumbs before one year of life is complete is a painful one to reflect
upon, and the necessity to reduce this waste of life is becoming greater
year by year in this country in face of our tailing birth-rate. It has
been pointed out that if the death-rate amongst calves were only half
of that which prevails amongst infants, the British farmer would before
very long have to entirely give up the business of rearing cattle.
The unnatural concurrence of a stationary infantile mortality with
a falling birth rate is one which seriously threatens the national
vitality, and it indicates the growing tendency towards the repudiation
of the duties of life, and of their subordination to pleasure and selfenjoyment.