Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies Collection

This book is about infant mortality decline, the rise of the infant welfare movement, outcomes in terms of changing priorities in child health and what happened to mothers and babies. Infant welfare raised public awareness but did not contribute as powerfully to improved infant survival - and so longer life - as protagonists claimed. This work shows what it meant for reformers, babies and mothers when the call was ''population is power: the nation that has the babies has the future''.