ABSTRACT
Public health was amidst a transformation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sociologically-based critiques have identified infant mortality, and the policies aimed at reducing it, as one of the signifiers of this transformation. This chapter focuses on infant mortality in an impoverished section of north Victorian Kensington, Notting Dale, and the creche system developed there as a philanthropic response to the social 'problem' of working mothers. In the case of high rates of infant mortality in Kensington, married women working as laundresses in Notting Dale Special Area (NDSA) were singled out as posing a threat to the life chances of their offspring. The steady decline of infant mortality across the whole of London in the early years of the twentieth century was by and large credited to a succession of cool summers that reduced the toll of diarrhoeal mortality.
