MOTHER AND BABY WEEK
By Dr: C. W. SALEEBY.
Q0 long as man is mortal, parenthood, the source of all the future, must determine the destiny of nations. But, since the paragon of animals, a little lower than the angels, begins his days as a helpless object, a darling toy to many women, a squalling brat to many men, babyhood is apt to be forgotten by all but the far-seeing few. Yet every generation must soon be gathered to its fathers and the race be raised again from helpless infancy. For its protection and enhance- ment it needs the practical vision of a Moses or a Disraeli. But these are rare ; a politician is a man who is always thinking of the next election, a statesman always ' of the next generation.
Thus, in the nineteenth century, amidst much real achievement in sanitation and the material conditions of life, infancy was overlooked. The fall of the birth- rate in France aroused a pioneer interest, which soon deplorably waned, in infancy in that country. The baby began to acquire a scarcity value, in view of the big battalions which were being born in Germany. In our own country we had a few great pioneers. Edinburgh produced my master and friend, the late Dr. J. W. Ballantyne, who received little honour in his .life, but whose concern for the an:e-natal is to-day the leading word, the master idea of all our work, and places him for ever in the line of eugenic prophecy (i.e.,' speaking for the Lord, or Nature) with Moses himself. Huddersfield gave us Benjamin Broadbent, who died last week, after glorious service to the helpless by, whom our nation must hereafter be helped. . I hope he is with Francis Thompson, " in the nurseries of Heaven." As Mayor of Huddersfield in 1904 he appealed to maternal pride and dignity, offering a sovereign, merely • worth twenty shillings, and a certificate signed by himself as mayor and beyond priCe, to the mothers who",kept" their–babies alive. He and S. G. Moore, then and now Medical Officer of Health for that city, thus began work *Of which, as a whole, we now record that during the present • century infant mortality in this country has been reduced by one-half. Ever since we began this work, rather more than twelity years ago, we have been told by. those whom I define, with convenient ambiguity, ' as the " better-dead " school of eugenists, that we have connived at national deterioration by. the survival of. the unfit. The official records of the physique and health of the nation's children in successive years are the overwhelming and perfect answer to that devilish lie.
We are returning, without superstition, and in exalted ' form, to the age-long praCtice of Mother and Child Worship. Certainly, at first, the task was to stop the shameful destruction of babies by summer diarrhoea during what one used to call, twenty years ago, the " deadly third quarter " of the year. That has been substantially conquered ; it was a matter of dirt, and the dirt—in milk, and the long tubes of those horrible old feeding bottles, and elsewhere—has been largely cleaned up. But, really, the problem is one of mother and baby. In 1906, Sir George Newman, as he now is, contributed, at my earnest plea, the first volume* to my New Library of Medicine on this subject, thitherto untreated in any book in our language. He dealt, of course, with summer diarrhoea, but his thesis was this— that infant mortality is a " social problem of mother- • hood." One may underline the idea by adding the • words, " rather than a medical problem of infancy." We must save the babies by and through their mothers, the naturally-divinely appointed saviours of infancy. Else we have forgotten what it means to occupy our place, in the world of creative evolution, as the Primates in the Order of the Mammalia. " Le lait et le coeur d'une maman ne se remplacent jamais."
This is the ninth " Baby Week " in this country, and the coming Sunday is to be called, for the first time, " Baby Sunday." We owe much to the National Baby Week Council,t which has taken over this idea of a " week " from the United States, where such superb results for the welfare of mothers and babies are now being achieved. The programme of the Summer School now in progress at Carnegie House indicates the progress that has been made. Summer diarrhoea, the wholesale murderer, out-Heroding Herod, of twenty years ago, when one used to plod over the country crying " one in seven," for that was the baby death-rate; is riot even upon the programme. Not the most sanguine and juvenile could have anticipated' such a thing in the early days. Nay, more ; the merely negative and preventive word, to stop the killing (for it was killing, national infanticide and nothing else), has yielded to the Creative Hygiene of to-morrow. The discussions deal with the care of the baby's mind, and its mother's mind ; and, above all, with the care of the expectant mother, in all her marvellous being. If prevention be better than cure, construction and provident creation are better than mere prevention. From the improvement of his environment—which, after ail, the bird and the beaver can achieve in part—man is, passing on to the creative control and direction of his own being and its evolution, thus becoming in greater measure' a partaker of the divine 'nature. But space fails, just as I feel myself to be warming pp to this most superlatively noble and entrancing theme. Let me call a forcible halt in order to serve the reader, • and motherhood and babyhood, in the best possible way. There is a crammed little book of 400 pages. No author nor publisher makes a penny out of it. Nothing half so good is in any language in this field. More than * Infant Mortality. Methuen and Co., 1906.
t Patron, H.M. The Queen ; Chairman, Lord Astor.; Secretary, Miss Norah March, B.Sc., Carnegie House, 117 Piccadilly, W. 1. twenty experts have written it. It covers the whole ground: A new edition, the fifth, has just been pub- lished. It has saved and served hosts of mothers and babies and homes in this and other countries. On this it is by far the best value in print that I know—worth its weight in radium, or ether, or Life itself, that Imponderable which outweighs all things. The book is called Mothercrafl,* and no home which contains or will contain children is safe or wise without it. Its teaching averts, for a few shillings, misery and pain, disease and death, which no thousands of guineas spent in Harley Street could cure. Much of my life is occupied in trying to tell my fellow countrymen and women about valuable things done in other countries which we should copy. Mother- craft, and our Baby campaign of the last twenty yearS, beat the world. There has never been such an achieve- ment ; perhaps because the need was for that combination of humane feeling and official plus voluntary effort in which we assuredly excel.
Some day science may so control nutrition and meta- bolism as to abolish natural death—with what conse- quences for life qui vivra terra. Till then, Modern Mother and Child Worship can never be displaced nor replaced. Protestantism lost something when if turned aside from the Baby in its .Mother's arms. The last word, fortunately, was not said by Hardy's English soldier in the Dynasts, who found Spain less pleasant than home, " where there's old fashioned tipple, and a proper God A'mighty instead of this eternal 'ooman and baby." Man that is born of woman needs to think more woman-wise than that ; and I have long intended to send a line to Mr. Hardy, and tell him that, in at least one instance, a public-house where they used to serve " old-fashioned tipple " has been turned by us into a Day Nursery and rechristened the Mother's Arms. If the decoration of it had been entrusted to me, I should have hung upon the walls the familiar but ever-adorable Madonna della Seggiola from the Pitti Palace in Florence ; a poem still unwritten, contrasting the Herodian and the Magian Weltanschauung; and the daring but sublime line of Whitman :— " The mechanic's wife, with her babe at her nipple, interceding
for every person born.'
Previous page
