Editors: MYRON E. WEGMAN, M.D..
UNDER this title Alan Moncrieff, Nuffield Professor of Child Health in the University of London, delivered the Newsholme Lectures in 1953. The series is now published in a slim volume by Oxford University Press and makes stimulating reading. Professor Moncrieff's experience and present position as physician-in-chief at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, fit him particularly well for combination of curative, clinical thinking, with prevention.
Opening the series is an introduction setting the stage in the light of Sir Arthur Newsholme's works in an earlier generation. Newsholme said that the health of every individual is a social concern and responsibility, but he raised important practical questions. How much can we afford for health, or, more particularly, for child health? And we are getting value for our money? Does state interference, state control, state provision of benefits or whatever it is called remove a sense of parental responsibility?
Moncrieff examines the problem under four headings: Infant Welfare; School Health; The Deprived Child; Parental Responsibility and The State. Considering under the first the question of medical care for motherhood, Newsholme noted that maternity and child welfare work represented a practical escape from the pathological to the physiological in public health problems. Yet Moncrieff notes that even now maternity care as provided in Britain has not been up to what it should be.