View report page

23
respectively. The weighing-room at the Latchmere Baths, which is
very centrally situate, is open on two afternoons a week, and that
at the Nine Elms Baths one afternoon a week, the hours of attendance
being from 3-5. This has proved a very useful method of
exercising supervision over the majority of the infants fed from
the Milk Depôt. The children are brought by their mothers to be
weighed weekly or fortnightly, and in this way the effect of the milk
is watched and any departure from the normal progress noted. The
feeding of an abnormal infant population such as constitutes the
larger proportion of those fed from the Milk Depôt, is one
requiring constant watchfulness, and it is frequently necessary to
substitute various additional modifications to those provided for
the different age periods to meet the requirements of individual
cases. It is largely due to the care taken in this direction that the
continued success of the Council's Infants Milk Depot is, in my
opinion, due, and much credit is due to Miss Moss for the able
manner in which she has supervised this work under the direction
of the Medical Officer of Health. The difficulty of providing an
assimilable diet for many of these sickly infants is one requiring
much care and thought, and it occasionally happens that one has
to take a child off the milk for a time, and resort to some other
method of feeding of which one's judgment would not, under
ordinary conditions, approve, but which practical experience finds
to be effective in overcoming the temporary difficulty. One is
reminded in such cases of the dictum of a celebrated physician, that
" you may give a baby anything as long as it is agreeing with it."
The weighing-room procedure has the further great advantage of
keeping the mothers in constant touch with the Health Visitors,
thereby providing an opportunity of educating them in the proper
methods of rearing their children.
The following is a summary of the work carried out in connection
with the Milk Depot during 1910 :—
Visits paid by Health Visitors to homes of infants
admitted to Milk Depot 1,288
Attendances of Health Visitors at Weighing-rooms 114
Number of infants attending Weighing-rooms 369
Weights registered 2,158
Number of infants under observation at home 117
Senile Mortality.
During the year 1910 in the Borough of Battersea 510 deaths
of persons aged 65 years and upwards were registered. The age
distribution of these deaths is set out in the following table:-