The family as the unit of health : papers presented at a round table at the 1948 annual conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund, November 17-18, 1948.

  • Milbank Memorial Fund.
Date:
1949
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The family as the unit of health : papers presented at a round table at the 1948 annual conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund, November 17-18, 1948. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the Oxford University Press in a book entitled Old People. The second investigation was of a medical nature, and was con fined to Wolverhampton, but the same sample was used. The results were published by the Oxford University Press for the Nuffield Foundation in a book entitled The Social Medicine of Old Age. I now want to give you the facts dealing with the social life of these old people. The first point: Of the 477 people who formed the sample, only 2 per cent were living in institutions, and 98 per cent were living at home. Clearly the problems of old age are funda mentally domestic rather than institutional problems. Statis tics available in Great Britain dealing with the proportion of old people who are ostensibly living alone, show figures which vary from place to place from somewhere about 10 per cent up to as much as 20 per cent. But I had not gone very far with the survey before I realized that these figures were of limited value if one’s attention was restricted to the house in which the old person was living, and much of the true mode of their existence in the community would be missed. An account of the actual instance which drew this to my attention will illustrate the point. Quite early in the survey I called on an old man of seventy- five, a retired carpenter, a nice old boy, living in a small work man’s house. I called on him on a Saturday afternoon and sat talking with him in the kitchen, and through the kitchen you could see his garden, a small garden, very nicely kept, full of flowers. What struck my attention so much was the fact that on the table was a bowl of flowers and on the mantelpiece there were two vases of flowers, very nicely arranged. Now, that is not an occupation that a man normally does himself, and no ordinary man goes into his own garden with a pair of scissors. It is a feminine instinct. And so I thought it was a point worth investigating. It appeared the flowers were arranged by a mar ried daughter living next door, and that he had another married daughter living further up the street. What was the family