he activities of Budin
and Pinard commenced. About 1900 a young Socialist doctor of Ghent, Dr.
Miele, started the first school of this kind, with girls of from twelve
to sixteen years of age as students and assistants. The School
eventually included as many as twelve different services, among these
being dispensaries for mothers, a mothers' friendly society, milk depots
both for babies and nursing mothers, health talks to mothers with
demonstrations, courses on puericulture (including anatomy, physiology,
preparation of foods, weighing, etc.) to girls between fourteen and
eighteen, who afterwards become eligible for appointment as paid
assistants.[4] In 1907 Schools for Mothers were introduced into England,
at first under the auspices of Dr. Sykes, Medical Officer of Health for
St. Pancras, London. Such Schools are now spreading everywhere. In the
end they will probably be considered necessary centres for any national
system of puericulture. Every girl at the end of her school life should
be expected to pass through a certain course of training at a School for
Mothers. It would be the technical school for the working-class mother,
while such a course would be invaluable for any girl, whatever her
social class, even if she is never called to be a mother herself or to
have the care of children.

The great movement of social reform during the nineteenth century, we
thus see, has moved in four stages, each of which has reinforced rather
than replaced that which went before: (1) the effort to cleanse the
gross filth of cities and to remedy obvious disorder by systematic
attention to scavenging, drainage, the supply of water and of artificial
light, as well as by improved policing; (2) the great system of factory
legislation for regulating the conditions of work, and to some extent
restraining the work of women and of children; (3) the introduction of
national systems of education, and the gradual extension of the idea of
education to cover far more than mere instruction; and (4), most
fundamental of all and last to appear, the effort to guard the child
before the school age, even at birth, even before birth, by bestowing
due care on the future mother.[5]

It may be pointed out that this movement of practical social reform has
been accompanied, stimulated, and guided by a corresponding movement in
the sciences which in their application are indispensable to the
progress of civilized social reform. There has been a process of