The Task of Social Hygiene | Page 6

the science of puericulture. Professor Budin of Paris may fairly be
regarded as the founder of puericulture by the establishment in Paris, in

1892, of Infant Consultations, to which mothers were encouraged to
bring their babies to be weighed and examined, any necessary advice
being given regarding the care of the baby. The mothers are persuaded
to suckle their infants if possible, and if their own health permits. For
the cases in which suckling is undesirable or impossible, Budin
established Milk Depôts, where pure milk is supplied at a low price or
freely. Infant Consultations and Milk Depôts are now becoming
common everywhere. A little later than Budin, another distinguished
French physician, Pinard, carried puericulture a step further back, but a
very important step, by initiating a movement for the care of the
pregnant woman. Pinard and his pupils have shown by a number of
detailed investigations that the children born to working mothers who
rest during the last three months of pregnancy, are to a marked extent
larger and finer than the children of those mothers who enjoy no such
period of rest, even though the mothers themselves may be equally
robust and healthy in both cases. Moreover, it is found that premature
birth, one of the commonest accidents of modern life, tends to be
prevented by such rest. The children of mothers who rest enjoy on the
average three weeks longer development in the womb than the children
of the mothers who do not rest, and this prolonged ante-natal
development cannot fail to be a benefit for the whole of the child's
subsequent life. The movement started by Pinard, though strictly a
continuation of the great movement for the improvement of the
conditions of life, takes us as far back as we are able to go on these
lines, and has in it the promise of an immense benefit to human
efficiency.
In connection with the movement of puericulture initiated by Budin and
Pinard must be mentioned the institution of Schools for Mothers, for it
is closely associated with the aims of puericulture. The School for
Mothers arose in Belgium, a little later than the activities of Budin and
Pinard commenced. About 1900 a young Socialist doctor of Ghent, Dr.
Miele, started the first school of this kind, with girls of from twelve to
sixteen years of age as students and assistants. The School eventually
included as many as twelve different services, among these being
dispensaries for mothers, a mothers' friendly society, milk depôts both
for babies and nursing mothers, health talks to mothers with

demonstrations, courses on puericulture (including anatomy,
physiology, preparation of foods, weighing, etc.) to girls between
fourteen and eighteen, who afterwards become eligible for appointment
as paid assistants.[4] In 1907 Schools for Mothers were introduced into
England, at first under the auspices of Dr. Sykes, Medical Officer of
Health for St. Pancras, London. Such Schools are now spreading
everywhere. In the end they will probably be considered necessary
centres for any national system of puericulture. Every girl at the end of
her school life should be expected to pass through a certain course of
training at a School for Mothers. It would be the technical school for
the working-class mother, while such a course would be invaluable for
any girl, whatever her social class, even if she is never called to be a
mother herself or to have the care of children.
The great movement of social reform during the nineteenth century, we
thus see, has moved in four stages, each of which has reinforced rather
than replaced that which went before: (1) the effort to cleanse the gross
filth of cities and to remedy obvious disorder by systematic attention to
scavenging, drainage, the supply of water and of artificial light, as well
as by improved policing; (2) the great system of factory legislation for
regulating the conditions of work, and to some extent restraining the
work of women and of children; (3) the introduction of national
systems of education, and the gradual extension of the idea of
education to cover far more than mere instruction; and (4), most
fundamental of all and last to appear, the effort to guard the child
before the school age, even at birth, even before birth, by bestowing
due care on the future mother.[5]
It may be pointed out that this movement of practical social reform has
been accompanied, stimulated, and guided by a corresponding
movement in the sciences which in their application are indispensable
to the progress of civilized social reform. There has been a process of
mutual action and reaction between science and practice. The social
movement has stimulated the development of abstract science, and the
new progress in science has enabled further advances to be made in
social practice. The era of expansion in sanitation was the