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9
Meanwhile, the infant-mortality rate, always accepted hitherto as
the most sensitive and reliable index to the health of the people, has
pursued a steady downward trend throughout the War and, singularly
enough, this applies equally in cities that have been bombed. Doubtless
the credit lies with certain off-setting factors, notably the favourable
effect of differential rationing which has been universal, and the fact
that more and more babies today are indirectly reaping the harvest of
the great maternity and child welfare movement which was officially
started in 1918. If so, this would account also for the parallel fall
which has occurred in the rates for still-births, neo-natal deaths and
prematurity, all of them tokens of the standard of motherhood.
Of the remaining rates, that for illegitimacy still stands disquietingly
high, whilst the malformation-rate alone clings to its pre-War
level. This is hardly surprising since, with few exceptions, the cause
of congenital malformation is genetic and its incidence is therefore
mathematical. The fact however that malformations have not increased
with the War should at last put a term to the ancient superstition that
they are due to some horrifying experience on the part of the expectant
mother.
The limit of statistics.
On the other hand, these routine figures only take into account
a small fraction of the known diseases, and even so merely to the
extent that they happen to be notifiable or to have caused death.
Nowhere is expression given to the fact that each year we lose in
industry in England and Wales an average of 40 million working
weeks; or that one out of six of our school entrants is still arriving with
some outspoken defect requiring immediate treatment. What is more,
the mass of minor ailments which in the aggregate account for the
major invalidity of the nation passes entirely unrecorded: yet the
Wartime Social Survey has indicated that 60% of all civilians between
the ages of 16 and 64 experience several times a year some ill-health
which is appreciable although not necessarily demanding their absence
from work. The fact is that these minor ailments fall largely within
the sphere of the private practitioner, in whose personal files a wealth
of statistical material has in the past been lost to the nation.