378 MEDICAL SECTION 



so much as a moderate amount of exercise taken by the 

 mother, and he had had an excellent opportunity of judging 

 of the effect in the borough in which he worked, because 

 a very large number of women who attended his consulta- 

 tions were women who went out charing. They scrubbed 

 the pavements outside the large houses in Oxford Street 

 and Regent Street, and it was really hard work. These 

 women had their dinners provided and very often their 

 teas as well; moreover, were very well paid for their 

 services. These working women were par excellence the 

 women who produced the best children, and he had never 

 found any evil effects from that sort of exercise. As for 

 turning the mangle, he was not prepared to make any 

 statement with respect to its influence, but with regard to 

 scrubbing he could say these women bore extremely healthy 

 children and in great contrast to the other class they had 

 in Marylebone namely, the women who led sedentary lives 

 in workrooms, tailoring, and so on. This latter class of 

 women lived without exercise and they produced children 

 who gave one a considerable amount of anxiety. He was 

 sorry that in this discussion the question of the effect of 

 alcohol on the foetus or the child had not been taken into 

 account, because, in his opinion, it had a more evil effect 

 than all other detrimental effects combined, including even 

 starvation. He consulted all the mothers who came to 

 him as far as he could, to try. and obtain their histories 

 with respect to habits of drink, beginning with the alcoholic 

 history of the father, if he had one, or the history of 

 sobriety, if he had one, and also as far as they could the 

 history of the mother. One knew one could not rely very 

 much on such statements, but often they got confirmation 

 by the subsequent visits of health visitors or the sanitary 

 inspectors. In this way he had got a large and long record 

 of the influence of alcohol. He had not worked it out yet, 

 but so far as he could see it had more effect than everything 

 else combined. 



Dr. P. JOHNSON (Medical Officer of Health, Stoke-on- 

 Trent) said he wanted in one word to emphasize the im- 

 portance of the subject of syphilis and to express the hope 

 that the International Congress of Medicine would face 

 the matter and deal with it in a very thorough way and 

 not, as had been indicated by Dr. Saleeby, as a subject to 

 be tabooed. His attention had been particularly drawn 

 to the question in dealing with cases of ophthalmia neona- 

 torum. They had in Stoke-on-Trent a very complete 

 system of notification of that disease and he found that it 

 was a disease very amenable to treatment except when 



