An Address on Medical Education and the Duty of the Community with Regard to it
Authors: A. Clark
Journal: BMJ (1888)

law to carry with her a bag containing all the necessary appli- ances By the kindness o Dr. Matthews Duncan I am able to show you one of these bags.Here, in addition to the usual arma- ment of catheter, scissors, tape, enema-syringe, etc., is all the apparatus necessary for disinfection, including the indispensable nail-brush; and, to give completeness to the arrangements, there is in every bag a book of instructions.If any midwife fails to use these things she is liable to punishment.The tendency of public opinion in this country is not in the direction of compul- sory legislation in such matters.The use of antiseptics in Great Britain is, and is likely to remain, a question of individual respon- sibility, not of penal enactment.Surely it ought not on that account to be considered the less binding.I have now stated my case.M1y plea has been on behalf not of the sickly, and aged, and useless members of the community, but of the mothers of this country, whose lives and health are of an importance quite incalculable.Tragedies such as those I have felt it my duty to relate to you are still being enacted in our midst.I know of a country town not far from London where, within the present year, puerperal fever has singled out the patients of one of the local practitioners exactly as it did at Plymouth and other places fifty and a hundred years ago.For six months every patient that he attended (with the exception of two, in whom labour was over before his arrival, and in whom, therefore, no examination was necessarv) died of nuernreral fever.May I, in conclusion, borrow the words of one whom the whole English-speaking profession reqards with affection and with pride, our venerable American confrere, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who, writing five and forty years ago of similar catastrophes, rose to an eloquence which even he has never surpassed?"It is," he says, "as a lesson rather thati as a reproach that I call up the memory of these irreparable errors and wrongs.No tongue can tell the heart-breaking calamity they have caused.They have closed the eyes just opened upon a new world of love and happiness; they have bowed the strength of manhood into the dust;they have cast the helplessness of infancy into the stranger's arms, or bequeathed it, with less crtuelty, the death of its dying parent.There is no tone deep enough for regret, and no voice loud enough for warning.The woman about to become a mother, or with her new-born infant upon her bosom, should be the object of trembling care and sympathy where.'ershe bwars lher tender burden, or stretches her aclhing limbs.The very outcast of the streets has pity upon her sister in degradation when the seal of promised maternity is impressed upon her.T)e remorseless vengeance of the law, brought down upon its victim by a ma- chinery as sure as destiny, is arrested in its fall at a word which reveals her transient claim for mercy.The solemn prayer of the liturgy singles out her sorrows from the multiplied trials of life, to plead for her in the hour of peril.G-od forbid that any mem- ber of the profession to wlhich slhe trusts her life, doubly precious at that eventful period, should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly, n~r RMdffghilr '9