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14
and at the same time be cheerful and healthy, is one of those
daily miracles that make the world so wonderful. These
mothers are certainly the salt of the earth.
" My next impression is that many mothers only bring
their children to the Centre because they are ill. This, when
it means a first visit at a month or so old, is not a bad thing
as the mother often then becomes a regular attendant.
" What is most annoying is the mother who comes once,
with a breast-fed baby satisfactory in every way, and then
never again until about eighteen months or two years later,
when she brings a miserable, pasty, undersized child with
bow legs. When reproached, she invariably says that, as to
the bow legs, the lady next door, or her mother, or her grandfather
(and sometimes the doctor) says ' He will grow out of
it as he gets older.' Only yesterday, since I wrote this, .Mrs.
T brought up, for his first visit only, George, now aged
twenty-one months, a miserable object who, at his first visit,
in August, 1923, was a fine, healthy baby, 10 lbs. at birth.
Asked about Alfred, who made one attendance only after his
first in infancy, she says he is attending hospital, ' where
they have put him in irons for rickets '
" The nurses do everything possible to get the mothers
to attend. Every day I have several mothers who come as
the direct result of judicious visiting, but one longs for some
means of enforcing a visit to the Centre at least once in two
months. However, in spite of this sort of mother, I have no
doubt that rickets is very much on the decline compared with
what it was about nine years ago, when I first visited Bethnal
Green.
" I think that on the whole the Bethnal Green baby
probably suffers more from want of fresh air than from anything
else. The homes are small and the mothers so busy,
they really can hardly manage to get out with the children.
Time after time, with children of two years or so, I have
advised extra hours of fresh air for Joss of appetite and persuaded
the mother (rather unbelieving) to give it a trial, and
time after time a tremendous improvement has been the
result.
" I think the rich woman's child gets its greatest advantage
over poor children, not so much from food or clothing, or
warmth, as from having a nurse to take it out for two hours
in the morning and afternoon, and from its regular midday
sleep. This also, one is gradually introducing, I hope, to
Bethnal Green.