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or unfavourable conditions reacting upon the mother during the later
months of pregnancy, e. g., poverty, defective nutrition, or having to go
out to work to earn a living. Such conditions are almost inevitable
under the present economic and social circumstances of the poor. Six
deaths of infants from injuries at birth, and two from suffocation due
to overlaying, are to some extent the effect of carelessness, ignorance,
and want of attention, and therefore preventable.
Between the ages of one month and 12 months 114 deaths, 62 per
cent. of total, were registered in 1905, 26 of these being due to diarrhœa,
and 5 to enteritis, 10 to whooping cough, 19 to bronchitis, 10 to pneumonia,
7 to convulsions, and 5 to congenital syphilis. A certain proportion
of these deaths are doubtless those of infants of congenitally
weak constitution, who have survived the first four weeks of life. But
a considerable proportion represent the toll that is paid for parental
ignorance, carelessness, and neglect, which are partly the result of those
conditions of poverty that must hamper the best-intentioned mothers,
when they are unable to provide either themselves or their offspring
with suitable nourishment, or which compel them to leave their homes
for the greater part of every day, in order to seek their livelihood, but
which are also to some extent the result of ignorance as to how children
should be healthily reared. Such ignorance is now being combatted by
the visits to the homes of the mothers of recently-born children already
alluded to. More good, perhaps, will in future be effected by teaching
the elementary principles of health to girls in the public schools of the
country. Whilst it is in the direction of education and sanitary enlightenment
that the greatest progress will be made; still, well directed
charitable effort might do more than it at present accomplishes to relieve
those conditions of poverty and distress that press especially upon the
expectant mother, and the mother who has both to earn a living and
bring up a baby, duties which are incompatible, and from which the
child is the principal sufferer.