1 Affiliated with American Red Cross Town and Country Nursing Service.

WORK FOR PREVENTION OF INFANT BLINDNESS.

The statements shown in General Table 1 concerning the prevention of infant blindness relate solely to work by nurses.

reported by 181 cities as carried on by 251 agencies.

Such work was

General Table 4, on page 106, is a Summary of State Laws and Rulings Relating to the Prevention of Blindness from Babies' Sore Eyes, founded on a statement published by the National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness and revised to include the laws of 1915.

MILK INSPECTION.

Inquiries covering country milk inspection, the scoring of dairies and stores selling milk, score cards employed, enforcement of bacteriological standards, and pasteurization ordinances were sent to all cities and towns having a population in 1910 of 10,000 and over. Of the 599 cities, 410 replied that milk inspection was carried on. Only 298 of these, however, supplemented this statement by returning the special schedule calling for detailed information. The tabulation of the information from these special schedules is presented in General Table 3, page 100.

1 Affiliated with American Red Cross Town and Country Nursing Service.

Of the 298 cities represented, all except 58 reported country milk inspection. Dairies are scored in 228 cities and stores selling milk in 98. The card used by the Department of Agriculture, or a modification of that card, has been adopted in 146 cities; a bacteriological standard is enforced in 176 cities; a pasteurization ordinance is reported by only 43 cities.

HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.

As explained elsewhere, this report deals with the infant-welfare and prenatal work of hospitals and dispensaries only so far as such work relates to the instruction of mothers and expectant mothers in infant hygiene and in the hygiene of pregnancy and to follow-up work by hospital nurses in keeping under observation babies who have left the hospital. No attempt was made to address all hospitals in the United States in order to bring out this information; the inquiry included, as in other cases, only those institutions to which reference was made in the original sources of information,1 with a few institutions added in the course of correspondence.

COOPERATION BETWEEN AGENCIES.

It has been found impossible to present information in such a way as to show the minute points of cooperation between the different private agencies engaged in infant-welfare work and between such agencies and city health departments. In the larger cities and in many of the smaller ones the health departments cooperate freely with all organizations having work in any way touching on the problem of infant mortality. Obviously in a statistical statement an attempt to describe such cooperation would not be practicable. But where the information available has pointed to definite phases of cooperation, such phases, as far as possible, have been indicated.

CITIES IN DIFFERENT CLASSES.

Table IV shows the distribution of certain phases of infant-welfare work in cities of different population groups. It includes, in addition to the cities represented in other tables, a group of places having a population in 1910 of less than 10,0002 and thus gives some idea of the growth of the work in smaller communities. The information concerning this last group has been gained more or less incidentally rather than by an exhaustive inquiry and does not by any means cover all infant-welfare work in the smaller places. It has a certain significance, however, as showing the tendency to include the instruction of mothers and prospective mothers in infant hygiene as a part of general nursing work.

1 See p. 7.

36248°-16-3

For list of cities see General Table 2, p. 96.