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notification to let the child be admitted to hospital. This she refused to do until the fourteenth
day of the disease, when the baby was admitted. In the meantime treated by private doctor
and visiting nurse. Private midwife's case.
K. D.—Slight opacity of one eye, the other normal. Onset not until about the sixteenth
day, and not notified until admitted to the fever hospital when 36 days old because the mother had
diphtheria.
W. T.—One eye destroyed and is to be removed, the other has opacities which have improved,
and the baby can see. The inflammation is said to have begun on the first day, and the case was
not notified until the eleventh day. The confinement was attended by a medical student, and the
patient was treated as an out-patient until notification. Upon notification a visiting nurse was
called in at once.
B. K.—One eye badly damaged, the other normal. The damage occurred before the baby
was discharged from the hospital in which it was born.
R. O.—One eye completely lost, and the other so much damaged that for a time the child
was quite blind. An operation, however, has restored the sight of the latter eye. The case was
never notified, and was unknown to the department until after it was admitted to hospital when
17 days old. Born in hospital.
In the cases known to the Department from the first the results have been most favourable.
The system of admitting the worst cases to hospital and sending in a visiting nurse to the others
(under skilled medical supervision) has given good results.
For the purpose of comparison a table is set out below showing certain particulars for
nine years. It will be seen that there has been a considerable increase in notified cases in the
last two years. A considerable portion of the increase was amongst the slight cases, but there

The same facilities as in the case of measles (see below) are available for the home nursing
of cases of Ophthalmia Neonatorum, and in 1921 the visiting nurses made 1,495 visits to 58 cases
of ophthalmia.