Infant mortality / by A.K. Chalmers, M.D., Medical Officer of Health, Glasgow.

  • Chalmers, A. K. (Archibald Kerr), 1856-1942
Date:
[1906?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Infant mortality / by A.K. Chalmers, M.D., Medical Officer of Health, Glasgow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    have yielded results which may be expressed in a general statemc they point, I think, with singular unanimity to the necessity systematic supervision of the nursling. This supervision may official or voluntary in character, but its best results are produ when operating through home influences. Of necessity, therefor* although to some extent unconsciously—the horizon of administrat preventive medicine is being pushed outwards, and individual prop] laxis is claiming assistance from its every-day activities. It is needless to ask how far we individually—or, what is m important, how far the Authorities which we represent—may leg mately go in this direction, i.e., may legitimately place to the pul charge the cost of an effort whose object commends itself to all of but whose methods introduce an entirely new departure into i domain of administration. We shall ultimately be judged by i results we produce, and the reclaiming of infant lives forms but i natural background as it were to the whole question of physi inefficiency in childhood and adolescence. Moreover, the urgency of the demand and the magnitude of t issues are obtaining public recognition, while few can be more conscic than are the members of this Society, of apprehension lest the oa which individual effort has produced should end in disillusionmt elsewhere, unless the varying circumstances of different districts a the causes of their infant deaths are kept in view. For, while we speak of infant mortality as the sum of causes wh reach their final phases in the first twelve months of extra-uter life, we need scarcely be reminded that among them must be reckor not only some which are ante-natal in their origin, but some that even ante-conceptional, or what Ballantyne so well expresses resulting from an interruption to the chain of normal heredity, i, as being due to cell deterioration or morbid heredity. There thus opens out a phase of the problem of infant mortal which for the moment is beyond administrative methods at lee and yet some conception of its volume is essential if we are reas< ably to consider the question : How much of the mortality of inf a is due to causes which may be directly attacked by methods administration ? Here, however, we are on the very borderland of conjecture, unless we are to regard mankind as wholly exempt from the operat: of those laws which appear to regulate the maintenance of spec in other forms of life, the number beginning any generation m always be considerably in excess of that which reaches maturi