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4
INTRODUCTION.
Medical Officer's Department,
Town Hall, Tottenham, N.15.
April, 1925.
To the Chairman and other Members of The
Maternity and Child Welfare Committee.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Your Committee is entrusted with the care of mothers, and of children
until they reach the age of five years. The Maternity and Child Welfare
Act was placed on the Statute Book in 1918, and the establishment of
a system whereby every opportunity may be given to every child born
within the area of your administration to develop normally has been
thoughtfully considered along lines that have proved by their results to
have been wise and effectual.
What remains to be done is to make popular the means at their
disposal for mothers to ascertain the proper methods of preserving their
own health and that of their offspring, and to fill in the gaps, where
they are discovered, that permit of wastage of health or life. At the
moment, the clinic that requires fostering is the Ante-Natal Clinic. To
that clinic should be assigned the function of ascertaining the causes of
ante-natal death, and of preventing them. This becomes the more urgent,
as the birth-rate shows indication of serious reduction.
Another direction in which the serious consideration of your Committee
is invoked is the preservation of very young infants. There does
not appear to be a greater prospect of success in the reduction of
mortality and morbidity than is likely to attend well-devised, organised
and administered clinics for the care of the pregnant and parturient
woman and for the neo-natal child. The lamentable maternal mortality
may be reduced, and still-births, in large numbers of instances, may be
obviated. Many infants die unnecessarily within the first four weeks of
their lives. These problems require to be tackled vigorously. Your
Committee have supplied the wherewithal for arresting the wastage of