EDUCATION IN INFANT HYGIENE : DISCUSSION 295 



tion of a girl must be to prepare her for womanhood and 

 not to show that at a pinch she could be a boy. Woman- 

 hood was the ideal to aim at, and whatever figures might 

 be brought forward in America subsequently it seemed to 

 him almost impossible that anyone on the other side to 

 Dr. Hedger would be able to prove the contrary proposal. 

 If they took Thompson's great book on the evolution of 

 sex they found that there was laid down the proposal that 

 they could only expend as much energy as they had got, 

 and he showed that the female organism, be it human, 

 animal, or vegetable, which was going to give more than 

 the male organism of its energy to the next generation, 

 must by that hypothesis have less energy to expend in some 

 ways upon itself. In other words, they could not eat their 

 cake and have it. It seemed to him there was a legitimate 

 reason for believing that if they extracted by external labour 

 as much energy from the girl as they did from the boy 

 there could not be remitted that extra quantity of energy 

 for future purposes which the woman required. That 

 seemed to him the essential point. Not only in America, 

 but in Europe, there were many figures to show that the 

 strain to which modern woman was being subjected it 

 might not be educational was having an effect upon the 

 reproductive system. There was going to be a discussion 

 in the country on the birth-rate shortly, and one of the 

 questions which would have to be dealt with was to what 

 extent the fall in the birth-rate was due to the slow 

 decadence of the reproductive faculty of modern women 

 under modern conditions, and it might be that the failure 

 to nurse was the forerunner of incapacity of parenthood 

 altogether. They had neglected hitherto the problem of 

 the influence of nutrition upon future parenthood, but there 

 was every reason to suppose that it mattered very much. 



Dr. SMART (Aberdeen) said it was very easy to be a 

 destructive critic, especially on the question of education, 

 and it required no great capacity for anyone who knew 

 something of education, both in the universities and 

 primary schools as it bore on infantile mortality, to pick 

 holes in it. It was somewhat ridiculous to think they 

 turned out from their highly equipped medical schools 

 young men and women who were able to deal with diseases 

 when the mother called them in. and yet were quite unfit 

 to give instruction in cases that were simply due to faulty 

 nutrition and bad feeding. It ought to be borne in mind 

 that, in training medical students, infant hygiene should 

 receive a much more definite place than it ever had done 

 before, and by infant hygiene he meant ante-natal hygiene. 



