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89
SECTION IV
PERSONAL HEALTH AND RELATED SOCIAL SERVICES
Although Health Visitors were first appointed in Liverpool in
1897 and in Birmingham some two years later, some voluntary
health visiting had taken place in Salford as early as 1862. However,
the Maternity and Child Welfare Services as we now know them had
their origins in the 'milk depots' set up in a number of towns at the
turn of the century for the express purpose of supplying clean cow's
milk to necessitous mothers who were unable to breast-feed their
infants. By 1907, some welfare clinics and schools for mothers were
already operating to provide free medical consultations for infants
on an ever increasing scale. Government support in the guise of the
Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918 gave added strength to
local authorities' powers to introduce schemes and today the care
of expectant and nursing mothers and their babies is an integral part
of these authorities' advisory and preventive services.
Lives of infants are at danger from exogenous or environmental
hazards and endogenous or congenital handicap or damage. To a
very large extent, the environmental aspects have been mastered and,
although many congenital conditions and malformations which
allowed no hope of cure in previous times are responding to surgery
and treatment, success is still limited. Possibly as a consequence, the
past few years have seen a reorientation of the function and purpose
of the child welfare clinic, which today, broadly seeks to provide a
diagnostic service for the early detection of mental and physical
handicap and endeavours to develop a child's ability to the full.
Furthermore, with the increasing use made of hospitals for confinements
coupled with early discharge schemes, local authority Maternity
Services are being inexorably pressured into a 'supportive' role
and the domiciliary midwife constrained to become a socio-nursing
health educator of the expectant and parturient mother.