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purchasing milk of sufficient purity for their infants, but also in
storing it properly at home, although they may be exceedingly
careful in mixing it in proper proportions and in administering
it through tubeless bottles. Every woman unable to suckle her
infant is, when visited, strongly urged to avail herself of the
properly modified milk from the Borough Council's Depot.
"Turning to the subject of clothing, it is the rarest thing to
find young infants hygienically clad, and properly protected
against cold. The clothing is distributed in a manner truly
ridiculous. While from the arm-pits downwards they are encased
in a species of bag acting as a vapour-bath, the upper part of the
chest and back, and the whole of the arms are merely covered in
a thin cotton substance. This practice obtains amongst the more
well-to-do who are able to buy woollen clothing for their babies.
Amongst the poorer classes, the babies' clothing is generally
deficient owing to lack of means to purchase more, and flannellette
is substituted for flannel; but even here, the distribution of
clothing follows the same ridiculous order; what there is being
arranged about the lower part of the baby's body, while the rest
goes unprotected. There can be little doubt that errors in clothing
have a considerable influence upon the high mortality amongst
infants from respiratory diseases. Exposure too, plays its part
here; babies are taken from hot kitchens where they have been
kept in a semi-smothered state in cots or cradles and are earned
in their mother's arms to the street-door and kept there without
additional clothing on the coldest days in winter, their unprotected
bald heads exposed to the winds, while the mother indulges in a
gossip with the neighbour next door or bargains with a hawker.
It is exceedingly difficult to impress upon the women the dangers
of this practice, and to instil into their minds the fact that a baby
requires to be kept at an equable temperature.
"In addition to the foregoing, the administration of drugs,
soothing syrups, and teething-powders, danger of sleeping in the