MILK AND CHILD MORTALITY 167 



Davies found that during the three years the depot had 

 been running 25 children fed on depot milk had died, the 

 death-rate being 81 per 1000. He compares this with the 

 death-rate of ordinary hand-fed children, which has been 

 estimated at 198 per 1000, excluding the deaths of children 

 in the first week of life, whose inclusion would greatly raise 

 the death-rate. He found that depot-fed infants only ran 

 one-fourth the risk of getting diarrhoea that other hand-fed 

 children were exposed to. They were, however, much more 

 prone to this disease than breast-fed children. 



In dealing with milk depot children it must be remem- 

 bered that they are a specially selected class of weaklings, 

 and usually do not remain long enough on the depot to fully 

 profit by it. As Newman ' puts it, referring to the Finsbury 

 Milk Depot : 



Taken as a whole, however, it is abundantly evident that the 

 dep6t-fed children suffered much less from epidemic diarrhoea and 

 all other diseases, than other artificially-fed children in the Borough, 

 and even when they were attacked had a much lower mortality. 

 And yet nearly all the dep6t children were of the very poorest 

 classes ; all of them were artificially fed ; all were living at home 

 and subject to precisely the same external conditions of life as 

 other infants in the Borough, and although they formed a selected 

 class of the weakest and most frail, " an unfit residuum " so to 

 speak, of the children born in Finsbury. But they received pure 

 milk and proper supervision and so they survived. 



Very valuable results have also been obtained in America 

 by the different Milk Commissions and other agencies which 

 distribute pure milk. Some of the results obtained are tabulated 

 by Kerr.^ The results cannot be given in the form of reliable 

 death-rates, but the number of deaths when given are clearly 

 few. The results obtained at Newark City (New Jersey) 

 will serve as an example. Dr. Coit, who initiated the Babies' 

 Hospital Milk Dispensary, writes : ^ 



We feed about 500 infants in the tenement houses who are not 

 admitted to our hospitals. They are brought to the annexe of the 

 Babies' Hospital and Consultations, and are then placed upon 



'■ -Report on Infant Mortality in Finsbury, 1906. 



2 Bulletin No. 50, PvMic Health and Marine Hospital Service, U.S.A., 1910. 



^ Personal communication. 



