ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the contribution pioneering health visitors, working in infant welfare clinics as well as undertaking home visits, made to the agendas. Disabled children became evidence of health visitors' professional failure as well as opportunities to develop and practice professional skills. Edwardian model of municipal health visiting introduced in Huddersfield, Hilary Marland makes it clear that the aim was to reduce preventable infant deaths and preserve the health of well babies rather than all newborns. Margot Jefferys suggested that the problems facing contemporary health visitors, explained in terms of role ambiguity, stemmed from their success in tackling serious threats to child health before 1948. The work of health visitors with working-class families before 1948 has often been criticized for being both authoritarian and ineffective. Such analysis can be applied to their care of disabled children but it is also valid to follow Margot Jefferys and conclude that many children avoided long-term impairment because of the interventions of health visitors.
