OUR BABIES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 593, 13 August 1913, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

Published under the auspices of the Society for the Health of Women and Children.

" It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom." PRE-NATAL CARE. The importance of pre-natal care was emphasised at tho annual meeting of the American Association for Study and Prevention of infant Mortality. Mrs William Lowell Putnam, the chairman of the Women's Municipal League, of Boston, writes: — "It was to demonstrate what gain would result from pre-natal care that the league began its experiment in April, ]909. The results have proved so satisfactory that last year the Boston Lying in Hospital established a pre-natal ciinic, with a visiting nurse, to carry on the work previously done for their house patients by the league. The Boston Board of Health so began in 1911 to send nurses throughout the city to care for mothers and babies before as well as after birth.

"The principal of the league , has been that pregnancy is normal function, and should not only be entered upon, but carefully carried through, under as noimal conditions as possible —not in a rest house, but in the woman's house —and that if the home conditions are wrong the remedy lies not in removing the woman, but in im proving the home. The number of patients cared for thus la? has been between 1200 and 1300, and they have been ordinary women living under ordinary circumstances. Most of them are of the working class, which nas but little or no margin in money matters. dependent wholly on daily work for daily bread. "They have come under the are of th 6 league, in various ways—reported by maternity hospitals, dispensaries, charitable agencies, and individuals, and a few by private physicians. We insist that all shall be under medical care, for neither nurse nor layman should assume medical responsibility.

"The routine of the committee calls for a visit at least every 10 days, however well the patient may be, and, if anything untoward arises, visits are made as much oftener as may be necessary. The nurss advises the patient with regard to diet, clothing, fresh air, the free use of water both for drinking and balking, rest, recrea tion, and work; but she never goes beyond these natural safeguards or trespasses on medical preserves further than to prescribe caseara internally or to strap an a<:hing back for external relief. At every visit she takes the blood pressure and makes certain tests, in the hope of thus warding off cases of possiible eclampsia. The statistics of the blood pressure are kept en care-fullv-prepared charts. "The result cf the care in reducing the number of cases which show symptoms of threatened eclampsia., or Bright's diseasp, as the layman calls it, has been most gratifying. During tha first year of thi3 wcrk the percentage of cases which showed symptoms of this dreaded disease was 10.2 per cent, of the totai number cared for. The second year this wa3 reduced to 4.8 per cent., and last year to only 1. i per cent. —this with a constantly increasing number of patients. "In the first year there were two miscarriages, only one in the second, and none in the oast two years. The percentage of still births has been 2, i pei- cent., as against a usual average of 3 8 per cent, where no pre-natal care has been given, The babies born prematurely are also relatively few —2 1 per cent, of the total number. Counting even these premature infants, the average birth weignt of the babies fcr the full term of the work has be;n 71b and for the last year 71b 15oz. "The patients ara under the care of the cummittee on an average be I tween two and three months, and in | one case for the full term. This i length of care is what is most de--1 sired, for it enables the patients, S both mother and baby, to avoid many ; pitfalls. i "The patient? ara almost without | exception grateful lor the help and | comfort given them by the nurses' i visits, and many of them ara the rough Ily appreciative. Often she has a chance to correct old wives lales poured into the ears of her patients by neighbours whose qualifications for the position of adviser are like those of the old woman found by a settlement nurse feeding her grandchild by hanging a fountain syringe full of milk from the mantelpiece and putting the end ot the tube in the baby's mouth as it lay in its basket on the floor. This process had the result that should have bren ra pected, and to the nurse's objections the grandmother replied, 'Shouldn't I know how to feed a baby; haven't I buried fourteen?' "Besides this work amongst the mothers, the committee is trying to lower the rate of infant mortality by persuading the Boston School Committee to introduce teaching in the care of babies into the regular cur riculum for girls of the seventh and eighth grades of the grammar schools. Not only would it help the babies of to-day. for these girls are the little mothers to whom the care of the baby is often confided by the overworked mother; but the babies of the next generation would profit even more, for the future mothers ould not then start with an ignorance so cra=3 as only to be believed when seers This teaching would mean an even earlier start than pre-natal care, and yet it does not supersede it, for nothing- can ever do that, not even eugenics, when it shall have become exalted and glori fied."