MOTHER AND CHILD

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 138, 7 December 1929, Page 23

MOTHER AND CHILD

NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, 18th October.

At the annual dinner of the British I Medical Association (Dr. H. B. Brackenburg, Chairman of Council, presiding) Mr. Arthur Greenwood, M.P. (Minister of Health) stated that the health of British people was not really worthy of a great Imperial State. It was all to the good that the rank and file of the medical profession should have been brought into definite relation with the community in the solution of health problems, and the results had been farreaching. The great campaign which was to be waged against the present rate of maternal mortality had his entire support. It was not an act against Nature, but an act to get rid of abnormalities arising from an abnormal civilised life. They were going to try and protect the human being at the earliest stage of its life. It was the policy of the Government —and it was his policy so far as he could carry it out—to do everything possible to ensure that the mother should have a fair chance to bring her child into the world, and that when the child was born, irrespective of social class, or of the economic • conditions of its parents, it should become a worthy citizen of our great nation. Public health was a problem which should be, but was not, in the forefront of the public mind. The public did not yet understand that prevention was better than cure, and they still clung to the extraordinary worship of the bottle of medicine.