The Home and the School

In 1946 the mothers of all babies born during the first week of March were contacted eight weeks after delivery by Dr. Douglas and his colleagues in England, Wales, and Scotland. Interviews were successfully completed with 90 percent of them. Of these 13,687 mothers, 7,287 completed a questionnaire dealing mainly with the availability of maternity services and the use they had made of them, and 6,400 replied to questions on medical expenditures and other costs associated with the birth of their babies. A report on these findings was published in 1948. 1 Originally, it was not intended that this should be the first stage of a long-term follow-up series of inquiries, but since the investigators found that they…