Abstract
In the 1920s professional interest and official concern expanded to the newborn. From 1900 to 1920 reformers were preoccupied with infant mortality, but their priorities after 1920 were neonatal (first month) mortality in babies and the deaths of mothers in childbirth. The spotlight was on birth and how birth was managed, to ensure the survival of the newborn child and its mother. I am concentrating on the baby, as opposed to the mother, because infant and maternal mortality were different problems. Mother and baby died from different causes, with different determinants.1 While ‘maternal and infant welfare’ was an umbrella term, reformers’ own measures, the yardsticks of mortality, showed these were distinct problems that called for different strategies. Furthermore, in the minds of the powerful who devised pronatalist policies, it was the baby who mattered: mothers were fulfilling their duty to the race.
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Notes
Irvine Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 1800–1950, Oxford, 1992, ch. 28.
P. Mein Smith, Maternity in Dispute: New Zealand 1920–1939, Wellington, 1986, ch. 1.
R. Marshall Allan, ‘Listerian Oration. The Future of Obstetrics’, MJA, 25 June 1927, p. 915
About one-fifth of maternal deaths were due to toxaemia, J.C. Windeyer, ‘The Toxaemias of Pregnancy with an Analysis of 158 Cases of Eclampsia’, TAMC, suppl. to MJA, 5 April 1924, p. 179 (18–20 per cent), A.M. Wilson, discussion following, p. 185 (22 per cent)
Marshall Allan reported 18 per cent, Frank M.C. Forster, ‘One Hundred Years of Obstetrical and Gynaecological Teaching in Victoria’, Aust & NZ J of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, vol. 6, no. 2, May 1966, p. 168
Loudon, ‘Deaths in Childbed from the Eighteenth Century to 1935’, Medical History, vol. 30, no. 1, January 1986, pp. 1–41
Contemporary sources include Morris, ‘An Essay on the Causes and Prevention of Maternal Morbidity and Mortality’, MJA, 12 September 1925, pp. 301–45;
Henry Jellett, The Causes and Prevention of Maternal Mortality, London, 1929.
See Lewis, ‘Maternity Care and the Threat of Puerperal Fever in Sydney, 1870–1939’, in Fildes, Marks and Marland (eds), Women and Children First, ch. 2
Annette Summers, ‘For I Have Ever So Much More Faith in Her Ability as a Nurse: The Eclipse of the Community Midwife in South Australia 1836–1942’, PhD thesis, Flinders University, 1996.
Cf., on the United States, J.W. Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750 to 1950, New York and London, 1986
P.L. Hipsley, ‘Stillbirths and Early Infantile Mortality’, MJA, 20 February 1925, pp. 203–7.
R. Marshall Allan, ‘Report on Maternal Mortality and Morbidity in the State of Victoria’, MJA, 2 June 1928, p. 675.
J.S. Purdy, ‘Maternal Mortality in Childbirth’, MJA, 15 January 1921, pp. 44–5.
This sweeping definition that covered any house or building, or even a tent, was designed to catch midwives suspected of acting as abortionists, Private Hospital Act 1908, Statutes of NSW, 8 Edw VII No. 14;
and Milton Lewis, ‘Hospitalization for Childbirth in Sydney, 1870–1939: The Modern Maternity Hospital and Improvement in the Health of Women’, JRAHS, vol. 66, pt 3, December 1980, pp. 202–3
Marshall Allan, ‘Interim Report on Maternal Mortality and Morbidity’, p. 6; VBNA, Annual Reports; Mein Smith, ‘Childbirth’, in Aplin, Foster and McKernan (eds), Australians: A Historical Dictionary, p. 75.
Vera Scantlebury Brown, ‘Education in Health (Relating to Mothers and Young Children)’, HB, no. 72, July–December 1942, p. 1933.
T.G. Wilson, ‘Some Remarks on Ante-Natal Supervision’, MJA, 16 January 1937, p. 86; ‘Fifty Years of Ante-Natal Care’, MJA, 25 August 1962, p. 309.
On the history of ante-natal care in Britain, see Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women, Oxford, 1984
A.M. Wilson, ‘Antenatal Study’, MJA, 15 Aug 1925, p. 192
J.H.L. Cumpston and F. McCallum, Public Health Services in Australia, Geneva, 1926, p. 51
H.A. Ridler, ‘An Outdoor Ante-Natal Clinic’, MJA, 18 October 1924, p. 393
The percentage is Morris’s, Report of the Director of Maternal and Baby Welfare, in Report of DGPH, NSW, 1928
Sums calculated from Ronald Mendelsohn, The Condition of the People: Social Welfare in Australia 1900–1975, Sydney, 1979, pp. 374–90;
‘Maternity Benefit’, MJA, 9 May 1925, p. 485.
Norman Rosenthal, People — Not Cases: The Royal District Nursing Service, Melbourne, 1974, ch. 5
Alison Cox, ‘Historical Outline of Tresillian’, draft paper, Sydney, January 1983
O’Hara, in Hetherington (ed.), Childhood and Society in Western Australia, p. 180
A.P. Derham, ‘Lectures to Nurses on Infant Feeding’, Children’s Hospital, Carlton, 1931, A.P. Derham Papers, 5/2/1;
J.F. Sinclair, ‘The Problem of the Premature Infant’, Archives of Pediatrics, vol. 37, 1920, pp. 141–2.
Mary Truby King, Mothercraft, Sydney, 1944, pp. 207–8;
See Thomas E. Cone, History of the Care and Feeding of the Premature Infant, Boston, 1985.
P.L Hipsley, ‘Natal and Neonatal Mortality and Morbidity’, TAMC, 1929, p. 93, Tables I and II, provided for Hipsley by Dr Margaret Harper.
Presbyterian Babies’ Home Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, July 1933
A. Jefferis Turner, ‘Maternal Nutrition and Neonatal Deaths: A Comparison of the Neonatal Mortality Rates of Queensland and South Australia’, MJA, 12 March 1938, p. 490–3.
Barbara Meredith, ‘Ante-Natal Care’, HB, no. 82, January–June 1945, pp. 2204–10.
Young and Ruzicka, ‘Mortality’, in UN ESCAP, Population of Australia, vol. 1, Table 95, p. 164.
F.W. Clements, A History of Human Nutrition in Australia, Melbourne, 1986, p. 134;
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© 1997 Philippa Mein Smith
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Smith, P.M. (1997). The Newborn and Neonatal Paediatrics. In: Mothers and King Baby. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14304-7_9
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