Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1918-08-16

be under attention of skilled obstetricians and COM
petent nurses. Such things, however, are beyond
the means of great many women, does
treme poverty provides suitable abundance and
variety of food. Economic stress often makes it
necessary for pregnant women to continue at en-
ployment up until the very hour of labor in this
way shutting themselves off from the essen
tial to the bearing of healthy children.
Conditions of this sort might be remedied to
some extent by the establishment o. moderately
priced confinement services. Hundreds of infants
would be saved to a community in a year, and
amount of suffering which makes so many
dread to face the task of maternity.
Essentially manufacturing town, Waterbury
mas for its chief industries the production of bronze
and brass manufactures This, of course, has been
considerably extended by the program, and
several new industries have been developed as a
result of the More than one-third of the fac
tory operatives supporting families found by
the Investigators to be earning less than $3.50 a
year. This included the fathers of 2.197 infants
very often this scant had to be supplemented
by the earnings of the mother. who by unduly ex-
ert1ng herself during the critical. stages of preg-
nancy and post maternity, brought harmful
sequences on herself and her children
Inc importance of sanitation to anv sort of
health program is we'll known, but its relation to
the health of infants is much greater than to the
health of older children or adults. Baby saving
involves much more than the prevention of
death, IL the babies be developed into intelli-
gent and capable citizens. City laws should pro-
vide that all urban dwellings be equipped with
sucn sanitary necessities as running water, indoor
DatntuDS and sewer connections. 1t is likewise the
duty or cities to provide for the education of ten
ants IN matters of hygiene inasmuch as the visest
OF laws can be rendered ineffective by ignorance or
olslnterestedness on the part of those for whose
beneht it is designed.
Railroad Hill is a long narrow section of Water
bury running between the Naugatuck river and tho
tracks OF the New York, New Haven and Hartford
railroad The city sewer is laid along the hill for
about one-quarter of the length. The greater
number of houses the hill were not connected
with the sewer, and waste pipes from the sinks
poured greasy water into the yards whence it ran
down hill into the swampy land about the river.
There were six basement dwellings in this district
all of them made unfit for habitation by this con
dition. The rest of the houses in Railroad Hill
were of frame, small, old and in very poor repair
In one of these houses, occupied bv wdo" fnnr
small children, every step the stairway was
broken. The roofs, floors and ceilings were sag
ging, covered with mildew, and threatening in
slant collapse. The door of two-room hut in the
same neighbOrhOOd had been blown away and was
replaced by curtain
In a third floor apartment of one Waterbury
tenement building lived nine-year-old bow in th.,
incipient stages of tuberculosis and a seventeen
year-old girl dying of bronchial asthma. In an
apartment adjoining, a baby had recently died Of
consumption, and another member of the family
was in the advanced stages of the same disease He
slept in small bedroom with his wife In an
other bedroom of the same size were crowded the
rest of the family, father, mother and two chill
dren. This room contained $50 cubic feet of air
space In another section of Waterbury, known
as Wards Flats, 2S0 persons were crowded into
four small and dilapidated buildings The walls
or these buildings were dark and filthy, the halls
dark and narrow, and the stairs generally broken.
The waste pipes of this section drained into river
which flowed along the SIDE.
Amid such conditions these it is obviously
impossible for infants to attain their rightful share
of development These evils are everywhere in
urgent need of correction and elimination. Yet
in most industrial cities the menacing conditions
far from being bettered, rapidly growing worse
England, France and Germany have at last awak-
ened to the woeful mistake of neglectng this prob
lem, and are trying frantically to retrieve it. 1t
is the manifest duty of the United States to lend
every effort toward the reduction of the infant
mortality rate in this country.