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33
Female Sanitary Inspectors and Health Visitors.
NOTIFICATION OF BIRTHS.
During the year 3986 visits were made to the homes of babies.
Early notification as required by the Act has been systematically carried
out, and it may be said that the Notification of Births Act is working
efficiently in the Borough.
There were 3121 births registered during 1914.
„ 3002 „ notified „ „
Your Lady Health Visitors report that they have visited 2227 homes
where children have been born. These visits have usually been made
about the middle of the second week where the notification has
been made by the midwife or responsible person, and shortly after
the mother is up, where a medical practitioner has notified the birth,
should your Medical Officer of Health consider it a suitable case for
visitation. Your Medical Officer considers that if visited early the
mother is open to receive advice concerning her offspring, and will
frequently tell the Health Visitors of little difficulties she may have
with other children and seek that advice which it is in the province of
a Health Visitor to give.
Breast-feeding is generally attempted for the first two months,
after which time the milk sometimes disappears or becomes of very
poor quality. It is unfortunately a fact that the child has then
frequently been fed either upon boiled bread, cheap brands of condensed
milk, or as an alternative skimmed milk.
It is hardly sufficiently realised that the artificial feeding of infants
has only been extensively practised within quite recent times and that
the feeding bottle was introduced within the memory of the present
generation. Whether we shall ever return to the habits of the prefeeding
bottle days or not it is difficult to say. If we do not it will not
be for want of serious warnings of the risks run by the bottle-fed baby,
namely—a liability to all kinds of digestive disturbances resulting in
impaired digestion for life ; a liability to rickets with deformities lasting
for life ; a greatly increased liability to die during the first year of life
from diarrhoea ; a lack of vital resistance causing the baby to succumb
more easily to the various diseases which it might contract; interference
with the proper development of both the temporary and permanent
teeth with effects lasting for life ; liability to scurvy; and liability to
contract tuberculosis by the ingestion of tuberculous milk.
c