| Administrative History | 'Mother and Child' was a health education journal directed principally at members of local authority health and welfare teams, but also distributed to teaching hospitals and UNICEF and WHO field officers, world-wide. A special 'Aberdeen' issue was published in September/October 1969, following Aberdeen's successful hosting of the British Medical Association's annual conference earlier that year. |
| Description | Article written for a special issue of 'Mother and Child' magazine, which was to be devoted to 'the splendid maternal and child health and welfare services in Aberdeen, to include general health education measures and the medico-social research ... being done in the University' (cited from accompanying letter from Lady Vera Dawe, editor of 'Mother and Child' to Mary Esslemont, 22 July 1969).
Mary Esslemont recounts the development of Aberdeen Maternity and Child Welfare Scheme in the first decade of the twentieth century; the appointment of Matthew Hay as the city's first Medical Officer of Health; the appointment of the city's first health visitors; the establishment , and demise some forty years later, of Aberdeen's Voluntary Association for Maternity and Child Welfare (of which Mary Esslemont's mother was President), which raised funds to start Child Welfare Clinics, supported the health visitor's work, and received the voluntary medical services of local G.P.s, including pioneer women doctors, Dr Laura Sandeman and Dr Agnes Thomson; the introduction of the National Health Service; greater specialisation within the medical and health professions; growing distinction between the work of G.P.s, health visitors and hospital doctors; co-operation, collaboration and also mis-communication between these three sectors; Aberdeen's novel efforts to integrate their work (e.g. 'attachment schemes' whereby' health visitors, midwives and district nurses are 'attached' to G.P. practices) |