368 MEDICAL SECTION 



agencies which were doing work in the direction of the pre- 

 vention of infantile mortality. He hoped that as a result of 

 this Conference there would be a desire to try and promote 

 such linking up, and if anyone had had experience of this he 

 trusted they would give the Conference the result of their 

 experience 



Miss CURTIS (Leeds Babies 1 Welcome) asked to be 

 allowed to say a few words about the work they did in 

 Leeds for the expectant mothers. During 1911-12 they had 

 200 expectant mothers on their books. The way they got 

 into touch with them -was by co-operating with the sanitary 

 authority, who with the infirmary notified their cases to 

 them. The Maternity Hospital and the West Riding Dis- 

 trict Nursing Association also notified their cases, and so 

 they prevented overlapping. They had a class for expectant 

 mothers, at which they had discussions. The mothers 

 would ask questions, whilst they also asked the mothers 

 questions. In that way they kept in touch with the mothers. 

 One discussion was entirely devoted to the subject of mis- 

 carriages. The mothers thought they were not at all impor- 

 tant, but at the end of the afternoon they were all very 

 much wiser. Besides this they visited the mothers at their 

 homes. One of the greatest difficulties in getting hold of 

 the expectant mothers was that many of them were " home 

 workers," and these worked up to the last moment. 



Miss HELEN G. KLAASSEN (Camberwell School for 

 Mothers) said she had been interested in maternity clubs for 

 a long time, and there were many of them of the old- 

 fashioned type in different parishes in London, and of late 

 years some of these had tried to improve their work by 

 watching pregnancy cases. She had been asked to say 

 what should be done with maternity clubs now that the 

 maternity benefit was in operation. How could they do the 

 visiting of pregnancy cases without knowing how to find 

 the women ? In future they would not have the oppor- 

 tunity of visiting the homes for the sake of collecting money 

 for confinements, and consequently they would lose their 

 chance of doing what had been so well described in the 

 two papers that day. She had come to the Conference 

 partly in the hope that some suggestion might be made as 

 to how they were to get at these cases in the future so as 

 to be able to do the work. She wished very much that the 

 cases could be notified beforehand to the approved socie- 

 ties, so that the latter might interest themselves in this 

 kind of work. If she might say one other thing which she 

 did not think had been touched upon in the papers, it was 

 as to the very great difficulty experienced in the case of the 



