amongst others, insufficient nourishment, unsuitable food, and dosing with opiates; beside this, there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of the children.[1] In those agricultural districts, “where a minimum in the employment of women exists, the death-rate is on the other hand very low.”[2] The Inquiry-Commission of 1861 led, however, to the unexpected result, that in some purely agricultural districts bordering on the North Sea, the death-rate of children under one year old almost equalled that of the worst factory districts. Dr. Julian Hunter was therefore commissioned to investigate this phenomenon on the spot. His report is incorporated with the “Sixth Report on Public Health.”[3] Up to that time it was supposed, that the children were decimated by malaria, and other diseases peculiar to low-lying and marshy districts. But the inquiry showed the very opposite, namely, that the same cause which drove away malaria, the conversion of the land, from a morass in winter and a scanty pasture in summer, into fruitful corn land, created the exceptional death-rate of the infants.[4] The 70 medical men, whom Dr. Hunter examined in that district, were “wonderfully in accord” on this point. In fact, the revolution in the mode of cultivation had led to the introduction of the industrial system. Married women, who work in gangs along with boys and girls, are, for a stipulated sum of money, placed at the disposal of the farmer, by a man called “the undertaker,” who contracts for the whole gang. “These gangs will sometimes travel many miles from their own village; they are to be met morning and evening on the roads, dressed in short petticoats, with suitable coats and boots, and sometimes trousers, looking wonderfully strong and healthy, but tainted with a customary immorality,
- ↑ It (the inquiry of 1861) … showed, moreover, that while, with the described circumstances, infants perish under the neglect and mismanagement which their mothers’ occupations imply, the mothers become to a grievous extent denaturalized towards their offspring—commonly not troubling themselves much at the death, and even sometimes … taking direct measures to insure it.” (l. c.)
- ↑ l. c., p. 454.
- ↑ l. c., p.454-463. “Report by Dr. Henry Julian Hunter on the excessive mortality of infants in some rural districts of England.”
- ↑ l. c. p. 35 and pp. 455, 456.
