Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
The “infant consultation” is the feature about which its activities
centre. Jimmie was taken regularly for the doctor’s inspection and
advice and there is on file there at the school a comprehensive record
in which is entered every fact of his family history and environment
and his own physical condition, with the phenomena of its changes
from week to week. The weekly weighing indicated very accurately
his progress. And the week that his weary mother’s milk failed, the
scales reported it. The modified milk was carefully prescribed but
the next week’s weighing indicated that Mrs. Smith wasn’t getting the
ingredients together right. The Health Visitor was assigned to go
home with her and show her just how. Like that, Jimmie was constantly
supervised. When the doctor at the consultation, tapping the little
distended abdomen with skilled fingers, announced, “This baby is
troubled with colic,” Mrs. Smith said he had been having it a good
deal lately. Well, a little questioning corrected the difficulty. The
trouble was pickles, and he never had them after that. Also he never
had the summer complaint, which the former Smith babies always had in
September.
You see, there is no proper cupboard at Jimmie’s house. There is
only the recess beside the chimney, and flies come straight from
the manure heap at the back of the house to the milk pitcher on the
shelf. Mrs. Smith didn’t know that flies mattered. She knows now, and
at the school she has learned that you protect the baby from summer
complaint by covering the pitcher with a muslin cloth. She also has
learned how to make the most ingenious cradle that ever was contrived.
It’s constructed from a banana box, but it perfectly well serves the
purpose for which it was designed. That Jimmie should sleep alone, is
one of the primary directions at the school. Of course, it is clear
that this is hygienically advisable, and there is another reason: these
crowded London areas are so crowded that even the one bed the family
usually possesses is also overcrowded. With some five other children
occupying it with their mother, there was danger that Jimmie would
some night be smothered. “Overlaying,” as it is called, is the reason
assigned in the death certificate for the loss of a good many London
babies.
BETTER BABIES ARE PRODUCED
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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