Mothers and Midwives

The mothers of British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain and his half brother, Minister of Health Neville Chamberlain, both died in childbirth.* Last week this fact was thought to account for the extraordinary warmth and fervor with which the Minister of Health addressed the House of Commons on the twin themes of maternal mortality and midwifery.

Customarily the manner of the Right Honorable Neville Chamberlain is cold and his delivery precise, but none could doubt his intense emotion when he cried: "It is a very terrible thing to think that today out of every 250 mothers, one dies in childbirth, and that this state of things has persisted for the last 20 years. . . . Meanwhile the general death rate has decreased from 14 per 1,000 to 12.3 and the infant mortality rate has dropped from 89 to 70 per 1,000. . . . Clearly the time has come when a great new effort ought to be made [Cries of 'Hear! Hear!'] to bring down the percentage of maternal mortality . . . which alone shows no improvement."

Amid renewed cheers and cries of "Hear! Hear!" Mr. Chamberlain then laid down a program for the creation by the Ministry of Health of two Departmental Committees of Inquiry, one to perform comprehensive field research upon maternal mortality, and the other to investigate "the status, training and remuneration of midwives . . . upon whom, after all, the success or failure of any efforts we may make to improve the conditions of childbirth must largely depend."

In the course of certain general and subsequent remarks the Minister of Health said crisply: "Rheumatism is the most costly of all diseases to industry. . . . It accounts for one-sixth of the whole industrial invalidity of the country. . . ."

*They were cousins, Mary and Florence Kenrick, and successively wives to that famed Joseph ("Joe") Chamberlain, who seldom appeared in the House of Commons without an orchid in his buttonhole, and was, from 1893 to 1905, Colonial Secretary. From Mary Kenrick he begat a son and daughter, from Florence two sons and three daughters, from his third wife, Mary Endicott, no babe.