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the Depôt; one was prematurely born, one had bronchitis and
diarrhoea, and the other two were wasting on admission.
Seven additional infants died after having left the Depot for
an interval varying from two days to two months.
It is difficult to give a Milk Depôt death-rate. I have elsewhere
shown that such death-rates, as often estimated, are
quite incomparable to the infantile death-rates of a normal
population.
The fairest way is to take the deaths occurring while children
are actually being fed at the Depot (deducting those dying
within a week of coming on, and adding deaths occurring
within a week of going off) and estimate the rate on the average
numbers being fed at one time. Adopting this method, the
death-rate last year was only 52 per 1,000. During the three
years that the Milk Depot has been running, 25 Depot fed
children died while on the Depot, and the death-rate was
81 per 1,000. This may be compared with the death-rate
of ordinary hand-fed children which has been estimated at 198
per 1,000, excluding the deaths of children in the first week of
life, whose inclusion would greatly raise the death-rate. Depôt
fed children are seldom under one week old. Without the
Depot 59 children would have died instead of 25; thus 34 lives
were saved, to say nothing of the much larger number of
children whose health was established.
Weighing of Infants. This part of the work of the Depot,
which corresponds to some extent to the School for Mothers
inaugurated in the Borough of St. Pancras, has largely
developed in the last two years. 207 (229 in 1908) Depot fed
infants were weighed, with a total of 952 weighings. 138 (122
in 1908) of these were weighed at least three times at intervals
of about a fortnight; of these 49 gained more than the average