[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sut,—Some few months ago
you were kind enough to allow me to raise a humble protest against " Crusader's " "enthusiastic finale " : "at the bedside of every British mother at her creative hour should stand a woman and a man" . . . "nurse and obstetrician." He was pleading that more money should be spent on the education of students in midwifery, and I objected that such a facile remedy for the alleged excessive mortality was unnecessary and would probably be useless since, on the authority of our highest obstetrical authority, now many years ago, every man who lost a ease in childbirth should go back to his hospital and learn his work, while, if he then lost another, he should abandon the practice of midwifery as being a danger to society, the fact being that the chief danger is due to the Streptococcus which every medical student, the world over, has long been taught to combat with surgical cleanliness. It is not, therefore, due to want of knowledge, but to culpable carelessness and wilful neglect of essential precautions, owing to hurried work, that cases are lost.
Miss Pankhurst now out-Herods Herod by practical'? demanding that every lying-in case be attended by an obstetric specialist Pity the poor specialist who has to waste his time on hundreds of normal cases for one that really needs his help—for that must be about the proportion. . Believe me, Sir, the despised midwife, "with her brief training grafted on to an elententary school education,". should be quit, capable of conducting the vast majority of labours. Let me rePat that during the War I found myself in charge of an Institution
that kept four midwives busy. These good women gave me neither trouble nor anxiety, seldom calling upon use to inter- fere, and we only lost one mother who came in moribund during the influenza epidemic and was delivered of dead twins. The only other death in the ward was that of a monster born with exposed viscera.
I have just been talking over a sensible letter that lately appeared in the Times, claiming that the alleged excessive mortality is fallacious, with a lady who manages the parish nurses on behalf of her husband, who is a busy general practi- tioner, and her experience is that the ordinary country midwife —though her origin may be much as above described—gives quite satisfactory results. And she sees the work of quite a number in the course of years.
To " Crusader's" already crushing expenses Miss Pankhurst proposes to add many more, too numerous to recapitulate here, including an anaesthetist and institutional and convales- cent home accommodation "for all mothers desiring them." Advocates of "social services" seem to lose all sense of proportion, and never to have had any economic sense. A spoonful of chloroform in a junker hooked on to the head of the bed, which the patient can administer to herself, is all that is necessary in the vast majority of cases, and is, perhaps, =objectionable as far as the mother is concerned, but how is poor old England to support the burden of these other luxuries added to the weight of other taxation that is already forcing her lips and nose under water 9-1 am, Sir, &e.,
F. WYATT-SMITH, Fell. Obst. Soc. Pita Moderne, Monte Carlo.
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