SYMPOSIUM ON PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEMS 81 
fants need not be born unfit because their mothers were not 
cared for during pregnancy? It is important, moreover, to 
impress the mother in advance of the baby’s arrival, with the 
urgency of breast feeding from the earliest possible moment 
after birth. 
Education, by means of the publication and distribution of 
properly prepared health literature, in the languages spoken in 
the community, may do something to improve the health not 
only of the prospective but of the nursing mother as well. Of 
course this will not avail where a woman’s poverty will not 
permit her to have the necessary nutrition and care. If sucha 
poverty group is large, the remedy frequently lies in the hands 
of the community itself, For example, a community need not 
permit industry to operate in such a manner that it absorbs the 
time and strength of a large part of the population and yet 
returns, in the form of wages, so little that the individual work- 
ers are unable to purchase the right to live in sanitary homes 
in healthful localities and to provide for themselves and their 
children a supply of clothing and food adequate for health 
and comfort. Any industry is a parasite on the community 
when its workers must herd together in unhealthy places and 
become a menace to the public health and morals. Children 
born in such surroundings, it has been demonstrated, die at 
an abnormal rate. Literature alone will not help a mother to 
protect her baby if her husband’s low earnings force her to 
labor and live under all the conditions of their resulting 
poverty that are so detrimental to health. Unless the com- 
munity evolves a plan of regulating the industries within its 
limits which, while employing, consume mentally and _ phys- 
ically the people whose hands labor to build and enrich them, 
it can never adequately reduce its infant or other death rate, 
or its expense of caring for defectives, dependents and de- 
linquents. 
Writers and speakers in recent years have so insisted upon 
the uselessness of the excessive number of infant deaths that 
the public is ready to regard infant mortality as an index of 
the efficiency of public health administration. Any health of- 
ficer who now convinces his community of the truth of New 
York’ motto, “Public health is purchasable,’’ and then makes 
it realize that a direct attack on infant mortality will, as a by- 
duct, create a healthier community will have done a great 
work. 
