DR. C. PAGET LAPAGE'S PAPER -J47 



by work on the usual lines of schools far mothers 

 to -reduce the infantile morbidity and mortality. So 

 many variable factors bear on infantile mortality that 

 it is necessary to have the accumulation of several 

 years' evidence before one can draw conclusions from 

 figures, but, up to the present, we have reason to 

 believe that the teaching and visiting are having an 

 appreciable effect on the infantile mortality in the 

 districts. As regards the infant morbidity we get 

 rather conflicting evidence : in one district there seems 

 to be little, if any, connection between low wages and 

 dirtiness in the house and bad health in the infants ; 

 but, in the other and poorer district, there is a distinct 

 relationship between low wages and dirty homes and 

 bad health in the infant. A woman who has a dirty 

 and untidy house is likely to be a careless and an 

 inefficient mother. 



At the Manchester Children's Hospital Dispensary 

 there have been 6, 188 deaths in infants under two 

 years of age during the last thirty years. 1 once 

 made an analysis of the causes of these deaths, and 

 this showed that digestive diseases give rise to a 

 far larger proportion of deaths in infancy than do 

 respiratory diseases, and especially so in the earlier 

 periods of the first year of life. The analysis also 

 showed that there is a greater amount of these diges- 

 tive diseases than there used to be. This is to some 

 extent due to the increase in summer diarrhoea, but is 

 by no means entirely to be accounted for in this way. 

 Now it is just in preventing these digestive disorders 

 that education can do most. 



At schools for mothers, at hospitals and in private 

 practice, one sees an extraordinary amount of ignorance 

 of matters relating to the care of infants, and especially 

 so if that infant is the firstborn. We all know that 

 anybody who possesses a valuable machine does not 

 like it to be handled by a novice. A man who is 

 going to buy a motor-car, if he is a novice and if 



