48 ADMINISTRATIVE SECTION 



the demise of that Board, the Privy Council till his 

 retirement in 1876. And yet we look through his 

 book in vain for any recognition of the general 

 problem of infant mortality, and to the end of the 

 nineteenth century a mortality of over 150 was 

 considered normal. 



We may turn again to the work of a barrister, the 

 late Sir Edwin Chadwick, 1 the prophet and pioneer 

 of English sanitation, who from his first published 

 essay in 1828 on Life Assurance, to his death in 

 1890, inquired in turn into every form of preventable 

 death that occurred to his observant and enlightened 



O 



mind. But neither in his writings nor in the fasci- 

 nating letters written him by Mill or Carlyle or any 

 of the great politicians or doctors of his time, is any 

 special allusion made to the preventable mortality of 

 infancy. 



Public health was mainly a question of epidemic 

 " fevers," and the causes of fever were sought in the 

 external surroundings of human life. The system of 

 public health administration confined its attention to 

 nuisances, sewage disposal, housing, and the isolation 

 of a few epidemic diseases almost exclusively to the 

 closing years of the nineteenth century. It was only 

 then that the growth of physiological and bacterio- 

 logical knowledge revealed the importance of indi- 

 vidual care and habit ; it was only then that the 

 declining birth-rate came to be known and that the 

 Education Acts, the spread of nursing, the publication 

 of the reports of medical officers of health, the 

 findings of Government inquiries, impressed on those 

 concerned the possibility, the national advantage, and 

 the imperative duty of reducing the rate of infant 

 mortality. In 1902 the Midwives Act was passed; 



1 " The Health of Nations," a Review of the Works of Edwin 

 Chadwick, by (Sir) B. W. Richardson. In 2 vols. Longmans, 

 Green and Co., 1887. 



