View report page

41
Nothing replaces human milk in its nutritious qualities for the
infant. Most artificial foods are but poor substitutes for the natural
food unless prepared with the utmost care. Breast-milk is comparitively
sterile, and it passes directly from the mother to the child,
without any intermediate state of transit during which infection may
take place. But with hand-feeding, infection may lurk in the milk,
in the vessels in which it is carried and in the bottle.
In 15 of the cases where death occurred from diarrhœal diseases
the mother was employed in some industry which entailed leaving
the home and placing the infant under the care of some other person.
Married female labour undoubtedly enters into the question of
premature weaning, but under present social conditions it is doubtful
if it is so important a factor in infantile mortality as it is somtimes
represented to be.
The Registrar General in his Report for 1905, discusses the
question of Infantile Mortality and the employment of married
women. He took two groups of fifteen towns, each containing
respectively the lowest and the highest proportions of occupied
married women, and compared their birth rate and infantile mortality
in two quinquennia. The birth rate is, as might have been
anticipated, lower in the towns having a high proportion of the
married women industrially employed. The relationship between
industrial employment of married women and infant mortality is
however, not very visible. In the first group of towns, having only
4 to 8 per cent. of its married women engaged in occupations, the
infant mortality in 1901-5 varied from 104 in Burton-on-Trent to
202 in Aberdare, the average for the 15 towns being 161; in the
second group of towns having from 20 to 39 per cent. of its married
women engaged in occupations, the infant mortality varied from 140
in Rochdale to 206 in Longton, the average for the 15 towns being
168. Evidently the result thus stated is dubious.
In a former Annual Report for Acton, the effect on the child of
married female labour was discussed, and the investigations made
last year point to the same conclusion as was arrived at on the
previous occasion. Out of 13 deaths of Prematurity which we
investigated, only two of the mothers were employed in industrial