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41
Amendment of their vital conditions, especially as regards
infant mortality, is very much a question of improving the
mothers. This is the greatest and most pressing sanitary problem
of the day. The further improvement, not of drainage, nor
housing, nor water supply, nor even of all that is comprehended
under sanitary engineering is of first importance in a modern
town. A proper perspective of the factors which chiefly under
modern conditions determine disease and mortality cannot fail
to give prominence, nay pre-eminence, to the influence of ignorance
and inaptitude the more fatal where domestic and so rudimentary
and primordially cogent. Even more important than the
elementary education of girls is the secondary training of young
women in the first principles and practice of domestic hygiene
and in the management of the home and of the young family.
BIRTH ENQUIRIES, 1906.
Report by Miss Gaul, Lady Health Visitor.
Enquiries into the care and feeding of infants have been
continued during the year 1906. This perhaps is the most
disheartening portion of the Health Visitor's work. There is so
very much which needs doing, and so little improvement to be
noticed for the energy expended.
It must, however, be remembered that the class of mother
most in need of advice, and who should benefit to the greatest
extent by the instruction given, is also the mother who has least
encouragement to make the effort necessary for any appreciable
alteration in her present regime.
It can hardly be surprising that women whose husbands are
so irregularly employed, that oftimes it is a matter of