EDUCATION IN INFANT HYGIENE : DISCUSSION 281 



necessary to the health of the community as were the 

 Medical Officers of Health, but at present the pay which 

 midwives received was such that it offered no inducement 

 for women of education to go in for the profession. It was 

 a most honourable profession; but was most badly paid. 

 She hoped that there would be a resolution moved from 

 the Conference that there should be some State aid for the 

 training and the payment of midwives throughout the length 

 and breadth of the country. 



Dr. ROBERTSON (Birmingham) thought that if the Con- 

 ference did nothing else it would have achieved a really good 

 work if it could impress the country with the necessity for 

 the better training of midwives. He felt that at the 

 present time the training in most of their institutions was 

 even more dangerous than the practice of the old untrained 

 midwives, because many of them after six weeks' training 

 were turned out to cases in the district with a diploma 

 which he knew was not a certificate, but which was meant 

 to show that they were fully competent to undertake all 

 sorts of duties. He felt very strongly that the Government 

 ought to insist upon no one being allowed to go out as a 

 trained midwife until she had had at least two years or per- 

 haps three years of training. He believed that nothing 

 short of hospital training would make a really efficient 

 midwife, because such training taught a woman he was 

 going to say to be obedient, but perhaps he had better say 

 it taught her to know what she ought to do and what she 

 ought not to do. He was quite certain that to allow them 

 to go out after six weeks' or two months' training was a 

 mistake, and he hoped some representations would be made 

 on this point. He knew the question bristled with diffi- 

 culties, because the supply of midwives was not great at 

 the present time, but under the Insurance Act they were 

 going to hand over a very much larger number of cases 

 than they ever had done before to midwives, and every 

 indication, he was glad to say, pointed to them being more 

 adequately paid. He recognized that in the past the pay- 

 ment which midwives had received was such as to discourage 

 the more competent women from entering that profession.. 



Miss LUCY HALL (Midwives' Institute), as a trainer of 

 midwives, agreed that the training midwives received was 

 inadequate for the great responsibility which was placed 

 upon them, but she did not think the State training of mid- 

 wives would get over the difficulty. Midwives ought to be 

 paid adequatelv; in the past they had been paid abominably: 

 and how could they expect an educated woman to pay for 

 an expensive training and live on next to nothing? She 



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