ADDRESS 



By A. JACOBI, M. D., New York 



In the official program of this Association I read as follows: 

 "The definition of still birth varies from time to time and from 

 place to place. Infants of days or of weeks may be counted 

 as still births. Frequently no publication is made of the num- 

 bers included under the title 'Still Births.' >: Another paragraph 

 says : "Deaths of infants 2 weeks old or under may be, and in 

 some cities are, thrown out of the mortality account." 



What I want you to do is to ask any woman who has waited 

 a year, or five years, or ten, for the final consummation of her 

 anxious loving hope, to what extent she consents to agree with 

 the cruel definition displayed in your program. Her tears or 

 her trembling lips will tell her tale of woe. The physician,. how- 

 ever, and the registrar may give you the approximate number 

 of prematurely cut-off human entities, and estimate the loss 

 experienced by mankind through the death of babies who might 

 have been spared and might have enjoyed and utilized the exist- 

 ence to which they had a legitimate claim. 



Excesses of infant mortality are not limited to advanced 

 months, in which the question of proper and wholesome nutri- 

 ment commands the attention of the physician, the statesman 

 and the philanthropist. On the contrary, the highest infant 

 mortality is observed in the first few weeks of life, when the 

 physical connection of the new creature with its mother has just 

 been severed. Its body, its blood and nerves are mostly the 

 results of inheritance. The future of the body was determined 

 in the womb. It depends on the functional and organic consti- 

 tution of father and mother. Their health furnishes healthy 

 infants; their debility or contamination a feeble or contaminated 

 offspring. Inheritance is a powerful factor in the formation and 

 health of the baby. That its nose or ear, its walk or its stature, 

 is inherited is a recognized fact. In the few minutes at my 

 disposal I may therefore merely be permitted to conclude that 

 the diseases and frailties of the parents will be reproduced, 

 actually or potentially, in the offspring; not always in the same 

 form, it is true, but frequently with such predispositions only 



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