272 MEDICAL SECTION 



the temperature when the child passes from the mother's 

 body into the world. That alone is one of the great causes 

 of death of infants. Then there is the third group of 

 diseases which we speak of as the diarrhoea group, and 

 which are due to ill-feeding; to all sorts of bad forms of 

 feeding. In 1910, which is the date of the last available 

 figures, 25,900 children died in the immaturity group; 16,000 

 children died in the pneumonia and bronchitis group; and 

 11,000 children died in the diarrhoea diseases group. My 

 point is that the decline has been in the groups of conditions 

 which respond most to education. I am thinking of educa- 

 tion in its very broadest sense the education of the people 

 with regard to the importance of the great problem; the 

 education of Parliament and of municipalities, and of the 

 medical profession; the education of the great mass of 

 motherhood of the country through the Press and through 

 the schools for mothers, and through a variety of agencies. 

 There has been an enormous advance in all sorts of infor- 

 mation and education with regard to this problem, and that 

 has borne /ruit in the remarkable decline which has taken 

 place in these four years, viz., 118 per thousand in 1907; 120 

 per thousand in 1908; 109 per thousand in 1909; 105 per 

 thousand in 1910; and the extraordinary figure of 95 per 

 thousand in 1912. I doubt if there has ever been a move- 

 ment which has reaped its harvest with such astonishing 

 rapidity as the movement on behalf of the prevention of 

 infantile mortality. I think it is a matter which should not 

 only encourage this Society to make it feel that it stands on 

 the top of happy hours, but should make us all feel that a 

 systematic attack from a dozen different directions on one 

 enemy is the way to grapple with the great problem of 

 physical conditions in this country. There is no one 

 panacea; there is no one answer. Causes and conditions 

 which occur in the body of the mother arise from an ancestry 

 of previous causes so complex and so remote that it is 

 impossible accurately to analyse them. I believe it is 

 because the attack has been made not only frontally but on 

 the flanks of the problem by a dozen different bodies that 

 we are able to meet together in conference at a time of 

 most extraordinary success. But I think we must warn 

 ourselves that next year or the year after we may not be 

 able to reduce from the 95 per thousand to a lower figure. 

 I am not very hopeful myself in seeing much further reduc- 

 tion. It may happen. Let us hope it will happen in the 

 immediate future, but I think the reduction can hardly 

 go on at the prodigious rate of fall from 145 and 150 in 

 1904 and 1905 to 95 in 1912. 



