d, to Hampton Institute, to Japan, and
suggested practical ways of assisting in tuberculosis campaigns and
child welfare. After four weeks of social enjoyment and Christian
teaching they returned again to their scattered branches with the
curtain total of their results from 88 in Newark to 355 in Madras.

[Illustration: PUTTING SPICES IN BABY'S MILK
Notice Feeding Vessels, Shell and Tin Cup]

What is Dr. Vera Singhe doing about it? With her two medical assistants,
her corps of nurses, and the increasing number of health visitors whom
she herself has trained, she has been able to reduce the death rate
among the babies in her care during 1920 from the city rate of 280 for
that year to 231.

But enough of statistics. More enlightening than printed reports is a
visit to the Triplicane Health Centre, where in the midst of a congested
district work is actually going on. We shall find no up-to-date building
with modern equipment, but a middle-class Hindu house, adapted as well
as may be to its new purpose. Among its obvious drawbacks, there is the
one advantage, that patients feel themselves at home and realize that
what the doctor does in those familiar surroundings they can carry over
to their own home life.

Our visit happens to be on a Thursday afternoon, which is Mothers' Day.
Thirty or more have gathered for an hour of sewing. It is interesting
to see mothers of families taking their first lessons in hemming and
overcasting, and creating for the first time with their own hands the
garments for which they have always been dependent on the bazaar
tailor. For these women have never been to school--their faces bear that
shut-in look of the illiterate, a look impossible to define, but just as
impossible to mistake when once it has been recognized. With the mothers
are a group of girls of ten or twelve, who are learning sewing at an
earlier age, when fingers are more pliant and less like to thumbs. Then
there are the babies, too--most of them health-centre babies, who come
for milk, for medicine, for weighing, over a familiar and oft-traveled
road. Fond mothers exhibit them with pride to the doctor, and there is
much comparison of offspring, much chatter, and much general
sociability.

Back of the dispensary is the milk room, where in an adapted and
Indianized apparatus, due to the doctor's ingenuity, the milk supply is
pasteurized each day, and given out only to babies whose mothers are
positively unable to nurse them,