48 ADDRESS 



Now, ladies and gentlemen, whatever is presented to this Asso- 

 ciation for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality should 

 be useful. Our father, Benjamin Franklin, claimed that no phi- 

 losophy was justified unless it served some purpose. I want, 

 you want, none of the numerous new-born babies to be lost that 

 can be saved. And many, most of them, can now be saved. To 

 give up a new born merely because it seems to be feeble and un- 

 promising, is preposterous. Kant, Goethe, Helmholtz, are re- 

 ported to have been puny waifs whose lives were despaired of. 

 Being saved, they added untold treasures to the intellectual capital 

 of the human race. The opportunities to save the new born, how- 

 ever, seem to be few, or rather have been few, only, mainly among 

 the poor. Thus stillbirths were reported in all Switzerland to 

 the number of 3 per cent.; amongst Swiss working- factory 

 women, however, nearly 8 per cent. a dead loss of 5 per cent., 

 provided even the 3 per cent, were unavoidable. I am afraid or 

 rather hopeful that many were not. 



You will admit that superior knowledge and skill and con- 

 scientiousness may save the new born as they do the aged. Now 

 I am quite sure that our young doctors, unless they have had the 

 great luck of being taught in obstetrical wards and practice, 

 learn, if at all, at the expense of the women who bear children, 

 and of the infants that are borne by them. And I f'ear lest many 

 of us, if not excessively old, remain always just so young. They 

 may be sure I mean no harm, either to them or to myself, for I 

 am willing to admit that I also, in what is sometimes called 

 advancing years, may have preserved or accumulated an un- 

 enviable amount of ignorance, to be remedied by my betters 

 or my successors. So I want to offend nobody, but what I want 

 more is that the babies live, and the country thrive through the 

 babies. But our medical schools do not begin to convey adequate 

 obstetrical knowledge and practice to the students. The frivol- 

 ous remark that doctors want each a cemetery for themselves 

 is not a source of smile or laughter only. Will the time ever 

 arise when practical wisdom that is to save women and chil- 

 dren will be attained without cold corpses and hot tears? 



Affluence and care and caution, and the services of a medical 

 man and a nurse the latter with or without an ornamental 

 knowledge of Latin and Greek I prefer without surround 

 the bed on which a newly born cry is first received. The num- 

 ber of those, however, who cannot enjoy such privileges, is 

 growing from year to year. The poor go without the safety 

 vouchsafed by knowledge and by means. Their women suffer 

 for want of help, the babies die without it. In New York 200 

 women are reported to have died of puerperal fever in one 



