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117
Report of the Medical Officer of Health.
99 infants were born prematurely, and 80 children were delicate
from birth, a decided increase compared with previous years.
There has been much more difficulty in tracing the illegitimate
than the legitimate births, and in nearly half of the former cases
we found the mother had removed on our second visit.
We have been only able to visit a few of the infants notified
to us from the Workhouse, as the mothers seldom returned to the
address from which they were admitted. We visited a total of
139 illegitimate births, but were unable to pay more than 50 second
visits. Seven of these illegitimate children died, two from Congenital
Debility, two from Bronchitis and Pneumonia, and three
from Diarrhœa. We found 38 mothers of illegitimate infants did
not belong to this Borough. 55 of the inf ants were breast-fed on the
first visit, but only 12 on the second visit, as in a large proportion
of cases the mothers had to return to work.
The pamphlet on the feeding of infants is in every case handed
to the mother or caretaker on our first visit, and is in many instances
kept from the birth of one child to that of the next. We also find
instances in which it has been borrowed from neighbours.
In the case of hand-feeding we find the mothers are very
largely discontinuing the use of the tube bottle for that of the
boat shaped one. 621 mothers had adopted the boat bottle when
resorting to artificial feeding, and 55 only were using the tube
bottle, although 15 mothers said they used the tube bottle at night.
We find it very hard to persuade the mothers to give up the
use of dummies or comforters, especially those who have large
families. We were pleased to find 1,562 of the mothers had not
begun the use of the comforter. 1,954 were using the comforter and
of these 480 informed us on our second visit that they had discontinued
its use. 175 mothers, however, had begun its use since our
first visit.