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Reviewed by:
  • Infant Mortality: A Continuing Social Problem
  • Simon Szreter
Eilidh Garrett, Chris Galley, Nicola Shelton, and Robert Woods, eds. Infant Mortality: A Continuing Social Problem. A volume to mark the centenary of the 1906 publication of Infant Mortality: a Social Problem by George Newman. Ashgate, U.K.: Aldershot2006, pp. xvii + 293, incl. Index.

The history of infant mortality in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain is a continuing intellectual problem that fascinates. Remaining stubbornly high at 150 deaths per 1,000 births until 1901 despite declines in death rates at most older ages since 1870, suddenly the infant mortality rate embarked on a headlong decline throughout the twentieth century. The editors are to be soundly congratulated on assembling a collection of excellent studies that will immediately become compulsory reading for all researchers in this field.

This cogent collection of essays accomplishes three related tasks. Sir George Newman's own contribution of 1906 is addressed in part I, which contains the editors' introduction plus two essays by Bob Woods and Chris Galley evaluating the place of Newman's book within debates at the time and since. Part II provides a showcase for the ingenuity with which demographic historians today are addressing the historical puzzle of infant morality, one hundred years after urban medical officers of health (MOH) began devoting their attentions to it. Part III contains two studies focused on recent and contemporary problems of infant mortality in Britain, by Danny Dorling and Yvonne Kelly, and concluding reflections, by Nicola Shelton. In putting these three parts together, the editors have successfully encouraged [End Page 960] a dialogue between high quality historical research and contemporary policy issues relating to this persistent health implication of social inequality.

In 1919, George Newman (later Sir George) became the first ever chief medical officer in the United Kingdom's new Ministry of Health. The threat to the nation's survival posed by infant mortality in the context of declining fertility and the losses on the battlefields was arguably the political imperative that had finally led to the creation of this Ministry, as Danny Dorling acutely observes. In 1906, Newman, an ambitious young MOH for Finsbury, had published his own interpretation of the great social problem of infant mortality. This book, along with his prudent affability and contacts, was instrumental in catapulting him into the new post of chief medical officer in the Board of Education, whence, with the patronage of the great éminence grise of the civil service, Sir George Morant, he was subsequently eased into the nation's premier public health post at the new ministry in 1919, ahead of the nation's incumbent chief medical officer at the now defunct Local Government Board—Arthur Newsholme.

The authors in part I have, understandably perhaps in a commemorative volume, erred on the side of politeness toward Newman. Bob Woods's final sentence is a masterly example of the art of restraint—deftly giving the last word to Sir Arthur Newsholme, noting of his 1906 review of Newman's book, "but there is no mention of Newman's stress on 'physical motherhood,' or of (Newman's) playing down the role of public health measures" (p. 49). Galley's article does make it quite clear that, as MOH of inner-city Finsbury, Newman's annual reports before 1905 curiously gave no more than routine attention to the subject of infant mortality. Thereafter, reacting to the famous 1904 Report of the Committee on Physical Deterioration, he jumped with alacrity onto the rolling bandwagon, whose pulling workhorse since the 1890s had been Arthur Newsholme, MOH for Brighton and, from 1909, the government's chief medical officer at the Local Government Board. The recommendations of the 1904 report also stimulated a series of national conferences on infant mortality and the founding of the School Medical Inspection Service, which was to provide the vehicle for Newman's personal route to the top in 1919. It is generally accepted, as Galley freely acknowledges, that Newman proceeded to achieve very little for the remainder of his career at the Ministry of Health, while depriving the nation of the services of the most able, radical, and far-sighted public health doctor and statesman of this...

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