380 



MEDICAL SECTION 



household carried on outside the household, but it was an 

 altogether different thing if the woman had to stand in one 

 position all day. The sort of exercise referred to by some of 

 the speakers was altogether a different thing from the 

 mechanical life which women had to undergo in factories 

 or laundries where the work necessitated standing all day 

 in one position. They did encourage the women as much 

 as they could to carry on their ordinary household duties 

 up to the very last minute before they went to bed. 



Dr. MOORE (Huddersfield) said he would like to suggest 

 to Dr. Macgregor that in the Notification of Births Act 

 they had included in fact the registration of stillbirths. It 

 did not include abortions, but they could obtain reliable 

 statistics as to the proportion of stillbirths in those localities 

 where the Notification of Births Act was in operation. He 

 hoped that the particular disease which had been engaging 

 so much of their attention would not assume in relation to 

 the general subject of infant mortality an importance 

 greater than from the pure scientific point of view it ought 

 to receive. It was an evil of immense importance from 

 another point of view, but strictly in relationship to the 

 number of lives which it destroyed amongst infants it was 

 not, in his opinion, a subject of very great importance. 

 If they had unlimited energy and unlimited resources, if 

 in the communities where they lived there was an abund- 

 ance of money forthcoming for all sorts of work in con- 

 nection with infant mortality, then naturally this subject 

 would receive complete attention and everything would be 

 done which was possible to limit the ravages of the disease, 

 but in the majority of cases he did not think that was the 

 case. In his opinion it behoved them rather to tackle first 

 those causes of death amongst infants which were the more 

 readily grappled with and which they might the more 

 speedily expect to deal with successfully. It was a pity 

 to waste a lot of energy. He would not say waste, but it 

 was a pity to expend a lot of energy in attempting to 

 eliminate from the death returns a disease which, if they 

 were able to eliminate it altogether, would only reduce 

 the death figure by perhaps a decimal per cent, or one or 

 two per cent., when there were causes of death which they 

 could at least as easily or perhaps more easily eliminate, 

 and which if eliminated would reduce the total figure by 

 perhaps 10 or 15 or 20 per cent. 



A DELEGATE wished to emphasize what Dr. Macgregor 

 had said, that it would be a great pity that an impression 

 should gain currency that this Conference considered work 

 before labour beneficial, and also as one speaker suggested 



