National Baby Week
THE notion of a special week for a special theme -1. conies from the United States, whence we took Baby Week and its name. I have always wished that we had called it Mother and Baby Week ; for that is what it has rightly become.
Human folk are at the head of the order of creatures called mammalia. This means that the human mother is the naturally and therefore the divinely appointed saviour of her baby, and that the right way in which to save the future of our race is not to replace the mother but to reinforce her. Every year the work of the Council* has been more definitely focussed upon this task—a task which becomes easier as we conquer certain mon- strous enemies which were neglected during the nineteenth century.
The general death-rate fell fast and far in the latter part of last century, but the baby death-rate not at all. Babies were very numerous then, and perhaps they had not attained the scarcity-value which is now theirs. " They keep coming and going," as the mother of many —mostly dead—once remarked to me. When this the twentieth century dawned, some of us began to discuss the dreadful deaths of babies, especially during the third quarter of the year—that quarter the first week of which coincides with National Baby Week, the first week in July. Indeed, that is why this week of the year was chosen. Thank Heaven its appropriate- ness has gone, and gone for ever. The national infan- ticide, by means of dirt and infection in milk, through long-tube feeding bottles, which slaughtered many tens of thousands of babies every summer in the past, has been ended for ever. It would assuredly begin again to-morrow morning if we let it, but we will not.
The last horrible triumph of dirt was in 1911, during a very hot and dry summer, when diarrhoea spread in its usual way, and hosts of ' hapless infants died. A decade later—in 1921—similar glorious weather, such as cricketers and holiday-makers love, returned ; but the campaign for infant welfare had made great strides, and the holocaust of 1911 was not repeated. On the ' contrary, as I have pointed out by a series of annual curves since 1914, in the preparation of which I was greatly helped by the late Lord Rhondda, a strong man who championed weak babies, the fact is that nowadays the sunny months of the year are the best for babies, protected against the infections that breed in dark heat everywhere ; whilst the deadliest quarter in recent years has been the first—January, February, March— because these are the darkest and smokiest and kill the babies through their lungs. If the Public Health
* National Baby Week Council : secretary, Miss Norah March, B.Sc., 117 Piccadilly, London, W.
(Smoke Abatement) Act had become law in a really effective form, it would have protected the air and the sunlight of our infants and children next winter from at least part of the customary pollution and destruction. In the annual curve of infant mortality the " summer peak," as we used to call it, has gone for ever, and the winter peak, now the highest point of the curve, will go the same way when we protect the babies' air and light as we have already protected their food. The National Baby Week Council has decided to make this matter a leading part of their campaign this year. In the course of the National Conference which is to be opened by the Minister of Health on Tuesday morning next, a special session is to be devoted to this subject, and to this the public are freely invited.* Two other questions have been chosen for special attention this year. One is the care of the teeth and the possibility of establishing dental clinics where such care May be begun really in time—which means during the lifetime of the milk-teeth, deciduous though they be, for the sake of those which follow and which the anato- mists fondly call " permanent." The other is sociological —the maintenance and support of what we niean by home. Remarkable data exist which show the irreplace- able character of that ancient and natural institution: It is made by woman. Man makes the herd, of which the club is the modern equivalent. Woman makes the home, and where there are no homes the people perish. Ruskin wrote nobly on this high theme at the end of a chapter in Sesame and Lilies : and modern students of infancy say the same thing in other words : " Le lait et le coeur d'une maman ne se remplacent jamais."
In past years we have had to meet the argument that infant mortality is a beneficent process of natural selec-: tion, raising the level of the race by its destruction of the better dead. To this argument, during a quarter of a century, I have offered at various times many replies, for many are available. For instance, slums and smoke, long-tube feeding bottles and alcoholic homes are not natural. It is an insult to Nature and her processes to call them .so. Again, natural selection may quickly and mercifully eliminate the unfit, but it does not horribly and permanently damage many of the fit in doing so. But for every infant killed many are damaged for life ; and in preventing the deaths we also prevent the damage; Yet again, where infant mortality is lowest, the general physique and vigour are highest. If the diabolical creed that we should allow the babies to be killed so as to enhance the quality of the race were aught but the disguised voice of cruel and greedy selfishness, then the young adults of New Zealand should be pitiful proof of the consequence of abrogating natural selection and keeping the unfit alive, for New Zealand has the lowest infant mortality in the Empire. But, in fact, New Zea- landers are glorious in physique and vigour. The superb young men they sent us in our days of desperate need in 1914, men each like Apollo and Hercules in one, and hosts more from Western Canada, where I have seen childhood flourishing in sunlight, were proof that the policy which cares for mothers and babies and children and reduces their death-rate is the policy which produces a glorious adult generation. So much for those friends of dirt and disease and death, whom, with convenient ambiguity, I call the " Better Dead " school.
The National Baby Week Council has always urged especially the care of the mother. There we have failed. To cut down the summer peak of deaths from diarrhoea * On Thursday, July 7th, at 7.30 p.m.. in the Great Hall, British Medical Association House, Tavistock Square, W.C. 1 ; Sir Arthur Newsholme presiding, Speakers Dr. Leonard Hill and Dr. C. W. Saleeby. was relatively easy ; to cut down the winter peak of deaths will not be difficult. But we have failed appreci- ably to cut down at all seasons of the year the death-rate in the earliest hours and days of infancy, because that is largely due to injuries, infections, poisonings, depriva- tions caused before birth, when we were not on our guard. The remedy for this neo-natal mortality—the deaths of the new-born—is to care for the expectant mother. Just a quarter of a century ago the first bed for an expectant mother in any hospital in the world was opened in the Royal Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh, according to the teaching of a great man, the late Dr. J. W. Ballantyne. I was a young resident physician in the hospital, and I remembered as I stood there how Ballantyne had told me that men had laughed at Pasteur for his work on microbes, and now all mankind honoured him, and that men laughed at Ballantyne's own work for expectant mothers, but some day it would be honoured. To-day, all over the civilized world, we are beginning at the beginning—with ante-natal work. The many places in this country which, though working for babies, have not yet started ante-natal work are wasting half their energy and must be reckoned behind the times and blind to the most urgent duty of all.
Only the race which regards its young renews its youth. A Dreadnought can be built in a year or two, but it takes twenty years to make a soldier, and he is too young then, poor boy. This year's crop of infants will be the infantry of the future : not, I hope, for wars of the old kind, but for what Walt Whitman has called " sane wars, sweet wars, life-giving wars, the great campaigns of peace to come."
CRUSADER.
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