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institutions has been much misunderstood. The Infants' Milk
Depot is not a milk shop. It supplies not ordinary milk, but milk
specially prepared under medical supervision for the consumption of
infants. The milk is supplied in separate bottles, each bottle
containing sufficient for one meal and no more. By this method
not only is the labour of the mother reduced to a minimum, and with
it the opportunities for making mistakes, but the danger of the home
contamination of food, which Dr. Newsholme has shown to be the
chief factor in the causation of summer diarrhœa, is also greatly
reduced. But the work of the Infants' Milk Depot is far from being
restricted to the distribution of specially-prepared milk. The milk
is only supplied to those mothers who can give good reasons for
their discontinuing to nurse the baby; and by advising applicants
for the milk it is possible, as I can testify from my own experience,
to persuade many mothers to continue nursing who would otherwise
have prematurely weaned their babies. A careful record is kept of
each child, for whose varying needs the milk is modified as occasion
requires. The homes of the babies fed upon the milk are visited by
health visitors, who explain the proper use of the milk, and the
mothers are encouraged to bring the babies periodically to the
depot to be weighed. The Milk Depot represents something far
more than a mere unregulated outburst of "municipal trading."
It is really, as Professor Marshall has pointed out in the current
number of the Economic Journal, a valuable educational influence.
It does things that a milk company does not do. And in considering
the question of "unfair competition" it must be borne in mind that
many of the children who are brought to the Depot have not been,
and but for the Depot, would not be, fed upon cow's milk at all.
Everyone who has worked amongst the poor knows that large
numbers of hand-fed babies are fed not upon cow's milk but upon
worthless patent foods and cheap brands of condensed milk. My
own experience has convinced me that the Infants' Milk Depot is of
great value from a public health point of view, and I have no doubt
that the establishment of a Milk Depot in the Kilburn Ward would
greatly tend to prevent the waste of infant life that now goes on
in that part of our Borough.
D