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46
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ST. KATHARINE, POPLAR.
Report of the Senior Medical Officer for the year ended
31st December, 1924.
Routine work at an Infant Welfare Centre affords interesting opportunities
of observing the babies' individual reactions to the difficulties
which beset them in the early months of life. The weight curve of the
first two or three years reflects this struggle very vividly. It is depressed
by illness or by environmental disadvantages, wavers, declines and
recovers as one obstacle after another is met and overcome. Welfare
Centres could, with profit, make collections of such charts showing
graphically some of the difficulties, successes and failures of their
attendants. Such collections would enhance the records of statistics
which tell merely the number of babies weighed or visited per annum.
A chart shown for the purposes of this report illustrates one aspect
of the work which has always been claimed as important by enthusiasts,
though it is sometimes belittled by those who regard the educative side
of Infant Welfare work as of only slight importance. There are many
cases of failures of nutrition dependent on a child's individual peculiarities;
others are more simple instances of faulty dietetics. Another group
contains those whose nutrition is more closely dependent on the general
hygiene, the mother's skill in handling and training, on clothing and
ventilation, sleep and so forth. The infants in this class should profit
especially by the supervision which a Welfare Centre supplies through the
medium of its clinics and health visitors. A physician practising from a
consulting room or hospital out-patient department can seldom review
more than a few of the influences at work; at the best he can but guess
what is the manner of the infant's upbringing at home. If management
is seriously at fault no real or lasting improvement can take place until
it is remedied. To remove the baby to an institution teaches the parent
nothing, for the mother can seldom participate in the treatment; and
the conditions in which an improvement is achieved there are too unlike
those at home to be helpful. Moreover in institutional treatment the
important element of "mothering" may have to be reduced to a dangerous
minimum, in any, that is to say, in which the staff of nurses is not so
numerous as to be almost prohibitively costly. The special danger of
acute infections in wards containing a number of ailing babies adds to
the drawback of taking an infant away from its home.
The infant, whose weight chart is reproduced, had had a varied
career before he first attended the welfare centre. It may be felt that to
quote an isolated example of this type and one which appears to flatter
theCentre's methods is unfair to those who had previously tried to improve