Illegitimate Babies Research Articles

Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer by Juan Pérez de Montalbán

Reviewed by: Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer by Juan Pérez de Montalbán Sidney Donnell Juan Pérez de Montalbán. Comedias varias. Volumen 3.1: Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, La más constante mujer. Edición de Claudia Demattè, David Arbesú y Philip Allen. Edition Reichenberger, 2016. 356 Pp. CLAUDIA DEMATTÈ DIRECTS THE SERIES Obras de Juan Pérez de Montalbán, which consists of critical editions of works by this celebrated author from the early seventeenth century. The present volume, Comedias varias, 3.1, is the first in the series to include three plays that never appeared in the official collected works that Montalbán and his father, Madrid bookseller Alonso Pérez, authorized for publication in 1635 and 1638. Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, and La más constante mujer are edited and introduced, respectively, by Demattè, David Arbesú, and Philip Allen. Arbesú provides the volume’s general introduction, briefly situating this installment in relation to the remainder of the series and, immediately thereafter, placing each of the three plays in relation to Montalbán’s oeuvre in general. As Arbesú explains, Morir y disimular (circa 1618) is possibly the very first three-act play the young dramatist ever wrote, Gravedad en Villaverde (circa 1624–25) is an adaptation of his exemplary novel La villana de Pinto (1624), and La más constante mujer (1632) is one of Montalbán’s most successful plays in terms of public and critical acclaim. Demattè’s, Arbesú’s, and Allen’s respective prologues provide concise explanations as to the provenance of Morir y disimular, Gravedad en Villaverde, and La más constante mujer and include detailed plot summaries, stemmata indicating the text’s transmission, and summaries of the metrical composition of the play texts. Works are presented in chronological order, and spelling is modernized following the standard practice among editors in the field. The volume’s editors discreetly limit their use of footnotes to clarifying usage (idioms and parlance unique to the early modern period), to explaining historical and literary references, and to elucidating published variants of [End Page 189] verse. The volume concludes with an index of footnote references (in lieu of a glossary) and a complete bibliography. The main body of the volume opens with Demattè’s introduction to her critical edition of Montalbán’s earliest play, Morir y disimular. The scholar offers a short yet well-documented discussion of the date of composition of the work, the general literary milieu in which the young poet grew and thrived, and the emblematic writing style that appears in this and his other plays. In this last respect, Demattè convincingly supports Montalbán’s authorship of this comedia heroica due to his frequent and keen use of metatextual references, irony, and other rhetorical devices characteristic of his corpus. In this regard, the critic correctly notes that Morir y disimular echoes plays by Montalbán’s chief mentor, Lope de Vega. In her philological study, Demattè rightly takes a moment to pay homage to the Modern Language Association’s efforts in 1938 to microfilm a large number of works (including a rare suelta edition of Morir y disimular) that were housed in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin and subsequently lost during the Second World War. Arbesú introduces the volume’s second full-length dramatic work, Gravedad en Villaverde. He summarizes scholarly debate as to the play’s authorship and settles on Victor Dixon’s definitive argument connecting the play text to its primary source, Montalbán’s exemplary novel La villana de Pinto. In addition to including a full plot summary of Gravedad en Villaverde, Arbesú compares Montalbán’s dramatic adaptation in verse with its earlier rendering in prose. The heroine of this tale of mistaken identity, which concludes with her romantic union with a nobleman, has a much more explicit origin story in Montalbán’s exemplary novel than in his play. A farmer (the young woman’s adoptive father) encounters a noblewoman (the heroine’s biological mother) who is about to kill her illegitimate baby (the future heroine). The farmer intervenes and adopts...

It Is Almost as If There Were a Written Script: Child Murder, Concealment of Birth, and the Unmarried Mother in Western Australia

It Is Almost as If There Were a Written Script: Child Murder, Concealment of Birth, and the Unmarried Mother in Western Australia

Female serial killers in the early modern age? Recurrent infanticide in Finland 1750–1896

This article examines multiple infanticide in early modern Finland in which the same woman killed several newborns after repeated hidden pregnancies and childbirths. A well-documented case in Lohja, Nummi and Pusula Court of Assizes in 1874 is compared with nine other recurrent infanticides in Finland in the period 1750–1896. The context of the series of crimes and the reasons why it took so long to apprehend the murderers differed from the majority of reported infanticides, which were quite unplanned and the perpetrators of which were apprehended within days of the act. These offenders were serial killers who experienced a need to kill even if they were not literally serial killers according to modern conceptions of male-oriented serial killing. They did not deliberately get themselves pregnant with men in order to obtain psychological gratification from killing newborn babies. Rather, they resorted to killing several of their illegitimate babies as a solution of birth control because their first such crime went unreported or unprosecuted, probably as a result of the complicity of others. Such a perpetrator in the early modern age is labeled a ‘love-child murderess’ or a ‘burker of newborns’, depending on her relationship with the father or fathers of the victims. Serial killings of newborn babies as a solution of birth control continue to exist in modern times as serial neonaticide. It is suggested that a perpetrator of this category of crime in all ages be labeled a ‘birth controller’.

Organising modern emotions

ORGANISING MODERN EMOTIONS Gillian Swanson, Drunk with the Glitter: Space, Consumption and Sexual Instability in Modern Urban Culture, London and New York, Routledge, 2007; 212pp, £14.99 paperback. The prediction in 1944 for what would happen to the untreated 'problem girl' was grim: 'the life of rich fantasy gives place to an increasing dementia until the patient glimmers dimly in a corner of the asylum, dull-witted as a cow'. This quote is not lightiy emphasised by Swanson, for what was at stake in the national effort to save the 'problem girl' (and the good time girls and the prostitutes and the male homosexuals) was modernity itself. Each of these figures needed to be made to reach out from the possible effects of the Second World War, past any chaotic internal state, to a social, neighbourly and national future marked by progress and a new civilisation emerging from the damage and ruin of war. Swanson presents her extraordinary accounts, of what could be described as a national intervention into the emotions, within a very elegant analysis that lets the fiali weight of the primary material be felt. While she is obviously sympathetic to the ways in which Nikolas Rose's Foucauldian-inspiredwork sits easily with these produced 'problem subjects', we also gain a sense of the complexity of the national discourses that are trying to be established. And behind that, we sense the individuals living lives of great change in what came to be understood as modernity. That they would know themselves through their expressed emotions, their sexuality and the places they could take up in this unpredictable space is somehow simultaneously expected and yet extraordinary. We would now expect the processes of a national inquiry to be productive, in the end, of some order of constrained subject/citizen, but what is a surprise in this book is to be moved by the efforts of both the original inquirers as well as those who were subject to their gaze. This ambiguity results, I suspect, from seeing an idea of active government and public commitment to the emotional state of its citizens as both an order of care but also of intrusion, one no longer readily imagined in the national register. The book begins with the new national focus on maternity and what were considered the effects of war upon it and women more generally. The imagined hysterical collapse on the home front did not occur, and so the establishment of constant familial routine (and so constant mothering) was to become one of the principles of maintaining wartime morale. But that principle of familial routine was caught up in other realities of the war period, such as the seventy per cent (and more) increase in venereal disease (1940-45) and the 'almost doubled' numbers of illegitimate babies in the same period. These same women, both constant and different, bedrock and threat to a national order, were not easily recognised by national programmes or amenable to the project of raising and maintaining national morale in wartime. But the situation of war meant that there were strong desires to mange the psychology of a group who may be 'disposed to mental breakdown' - a habit of scrutiny that continued after the war. That breakdown, as mentioned before, did not occur, and, as Swanson quoting Titmus ( 1 950) writes: 'The most prevalent and the most marked symptom of psychological disturbance among the civilian population during the war was not panic or hysteria but bed-wetting'. Think of all those children removed for 'their own good' reacting to national threat and acute familial dispersal. Through this focus on nerves and marital relations and absent children and fathers, there arose an abiding concern, post-war, with the idea of the national character and its maintenance. Coming into the 1950s, this meant making a place for sexually satisfied mothers who, it was hoped, would fashion themselves through modes of acceptable consumption along acceptable paths through the growing cities. …

Simulacre et modernité : l’illusion d’optique dans On the Western Circuit de Thomas Hardy

This paper focuses on various visual devices which Thomas Hardy chooses to include in his short stories in order to question the Victorian cult of progress, such as photographs, the Crystal Palace or more unexpectedly the phenakistiscope, which clearly lies behind the obsessional description of the « steam circus » in the short story entitled On the Western Circuit. Although Hardy was forced to bowdlerize his text, removing allusions to sexual intercourse and subsequent pregnancy, the real shock lies less in the hackneyed sentimentality of the illegitimate baby theme than in the depiction of modernity and modern exchanges — or systems of communication through trains, letters, or judicial rounds — as vicious circles breeding spurious desires and fantasies. The novel displays the enticing flickering sparks of desire created by the new wheel of fortune, turning the steam circus into a metaphor of ruthless mutations and hopelessly warped human relationships.

Kotirintaman aseveljeyttä: Suomalaisen siviiliväestön ja saksalaisen sotaväen rinnakaiselo Pohjois-Suomessa 1941-1944 by Marianne Junila (review)

REVIEWS 767 a majorsource of camp 'recruitment'over the ensuingfiveyears -victimized mainlypeasants,when in factthey hit workersjust as hard, and fromlate I 948 onwardsaffectedwhite collaremployees even harder.The editorialapparatus is somewhat lacking. The book has an index of camp names and an index of personalnames, but incrediblyhas no subjectindex. Carol Flath'stranslation is not merely excellent, it is outstanding,but even here there are lapses. She is not always comfortable with social science terminology and quite unfamiliar with Russian terms drawn from Marxism. Thus her rendering (p. I44) of the Hegelian-Marxist concept 'negation of the negation' as 'double negative' unfortunatelynegates one of Ivanova's many wonderful uses of irony. There are some annoying inconsistencies in the translationof place names and the use of abbreviations.The Ministryof InternalAffairsis sometimes referredto as MVD and MIA within one and the same sentence. Readers who do not know Russian are very likely to assume that these are two different organizations only one of which is given in the List of Abbreviations on pp. ix-xi. Department ofSociology andAnthropology DONALD FILTZER University ofEastLondon Junila, Marianne. Kotirintaman asevejf1yttd. Suomalaisen siviilivdestdn ja saksalaisen sotavaen rinnakaiselo Pohjois-Suomessa I94I-I944. BibliothecaHistorica, 6I. SuomalaisenKirjallisuudenSeura,Helsinki,2000. 385 pp. Notes. Tables. Figures.Bibliography.Index. FM i6o.oo. MARIANNE JUNILA has written a pioneering study of an untypical episode of the Second WorldWar.As part of the Barbarossaoperation, a German army operated in northernFinland, alongside a substantialcivilian population, but the Nazi troops found a local population that was friendlyboth at officialand informallevels. This is a verythoroughpiece of research,combining extensive recordsfromboth sides,with evidence fromindividualswho lived throughthe experience. The evaluationof the sourcesis impressiveand itspossibilitiesand limitationsmade clear. The period of co-existence was not expected by either side to last long, since the offensivewould takethe Germansdeep into Russia. In fact, the Germans were halted close to the Finnish border, and for three yearsengaged in positionalwarfarethatrequireda largelogisticaland support network in Finland. For example, their headquartersin Rovaniemi, a small provincial town, had a permanent staff of 3,500, many billeted in Finnish homes. There was also a communication problem at the popular level -the number of ordinaryFinns with any facility in German was very limited, and on the German side, knowledgeof Finnishwas non-existent. The researchrevealsa remarkablesuccessinbuildingapositiverelationship thatworkedat alllevels, and lasteduntilthebreakingof relationsin September 1944. It was grounded on German official policy, laid down by Hitler, requiring undeviating respect by the troops for the local population, which was embodied in army standingordersand propaganda. It was facilitatedby the human relations skills of General Dietl, the local commander until his death in the summerof 1944, who was strictwith his men but forthcomingto 768 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 the Finns. On the Finnish side the Provincial Governor, K. Hillila was firm, but diplomaticin assertingthe rightsof the local population and had excellent relations with the German authorities. The variousjoint liaison committees thatwere establishedworkedwell. The soldiersenjoyed extra-territorialstatus in Finland, and hence were beyond the jurisdiction of the Finnish civil authorities,but althoughthe Germansrequestedto be given local controlover civil populations close to the front, this was alwaysrefusedby the Finns. The ensuing cooperation smoothed away basic causesof friction.In the autumn of 1941 one newly-arrivedGerman unit, facing an arcticwinterwith inadequate equipment, indulged in widespreadillegal requisitioningand looting, but this was quickly stopped and did not recur. On the whole the Germans were meticulous in paying for what they needed, compensating for damage, even agreeing to pay upkeep for the illegitimate babies of servicemen. Their presence brought a considerable economic boom, by hiring labour and servicesat high rates.At thegrass-rootslevel, theyprovidedmuch-appreciated suppliesunofficially,by tradingarmystoresand rationsforlocal farmproduce on a toleratedblackmarket.The Finnishauthoritieshad enforcedprohibition in north Finland, but the German soldiers had abundant alcohol and their willingness to share with, or sell it to civilians was a furtherpositive factor, though a constant irritantto the authoritieson both sides. The only low-level source of conflict was the inevitable drunken brawling between soldiers and civilians, and fatalities from this were remarkablyfew. Trafficwas a further source of trouble;the local people were quite unaccustomed to heavy motor traffic,and the Germanstended to claim absolutepriorityformilitaryvehicles which the Finnsdeclined to recognize, and therewere many accidents. These problemscould be settledby compensation. One obstinateproblemthat could not be resolved...

White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus

IN CRITICISM ON ISSUES OF RACE IN TITUS ANDRONICUS, blackness has usually been the focus, particularly as it is embodied in Aaron the Moor.1 Whiteness remains in the background. In this essay, I will put whiteness in the foreground in an attempt to dismantle a black/white binary. I will explore the denaturalization of whiteness in Titus Andronicus and its construction along an unstable continuum of racial identities. Though Aaron's adulterous lover, Tamora, has attracted much less attention, the racial issues she raises are no less interesting. If Aaron is coded as black, Tamora is represented as hyperwhite. Her husband, himself a Roman, has singled her out and married her for her hue: In the racial thinking of the time, the adulterous liaison between Aaron and Tamora that produces an illegitimate baby appears as a kind of enhanced miscegenation, ultrablack crossed with ultrawhite. Why are these racial extremes paired in this play, and to what cultural anxieties might the sexual misdeeds of Tamora and Aaron have been responding. What are

Who were the families of “natural” children in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil?: A comparison of baptismal and census records

The article analyzes the census records for Sao Cristovao in 1870 to determine the proportions of single mothers in the population and whether they were living in female-headed households, as companheiras in male-headed households (in consensual union), or as agregadas or dependent members of a household headed by someone else, who was not the sexual partner of the single mother. The socio-economic and racial characteristics of the single mothers are also compared to each other and to the married population. The data suggest that approximately one-third of single Brazilian mothers and their children were living in informal two-parent relationships. These women were not substantially different from the two-thirds of single mothers who were living either as female heads of households or as dependents in other households, in terms of race, age, or occupation. Women who were female heads of households were somewhat older than the average single mother in a consensual union, and the women living in dependent situations were slightly younger. The greatest difference between these two groups of women is that many married mothers had no occupations while the vast majority of single mothers listed professions. The baptismal records of illegitimate babies suggest that the vast majority of them had ritual kinfolk, and some were grandparents involved in their baptisms and perhaps also in their daily living arrangements.

Race and ‘Value’: Black and White Illegitimate Babies, in the U.S.A., 1945-1965

Race and ‘Value’: Black and White Illegitimate Babies, in the U.S.A., 1945-1965

Rebecca West , and: The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West , and: Jean Rhys , and: Jean Rhys . (review)

Reviewed by: Rebecca West, and: The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West, and: Jean Rhys, and: Jean Rhys. Alice Crozier Fay Weldon . Rebecca West. The Lives of Modern Women Series. New York: Penguin, 1985. 96 pp. pb. $4.95. Harold Orel . The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin's, 1986. 235 pp. $27.50. Carole Angier . Jean Rhys. The Lives of Modern Women Series. New York: Penguin, 1985. 113 pp. pb. $4.95. Arnold Davidson . Jean Rhys. New York: Ungar, 1985. 175 pp. $13.95. [Begin Page 672] An eminent (male) critic remarked to me several years ago and with a straight face: "If Edith Wharton were a man she would be a major figure." It was a recognition of the difficulty of that reassessment of women's literary achievement, and of the canon that selectively excluded it from major figurehood, that has been going on now for almost twenty years. The four books under review all participate in this effort to reevaluate women's literary work. Jean Rhys and Rebecca West are excellent subjects for such scrutiny. Rhys, since her reappearance from oblivion in 1957 with the BBC radio version of Good Morning, Midnight and the critical triumph in 1966 of Wide Sargasso Sea, has attracted a fervent group of admirers and a solid readership. Dame Rebecca West, an imposing presence among her contemporaries, has slipped badly as they have aged and is now widely unread and ripe for a rehabilitation effort. Although Rhys is far better established than West, there is still movement in critical judgments of Rhys and uncertainty about her final standing among modernist writers. The current reputation of West is in serious disrepair: we recall her association with famous men—the lover of H. G. Wells, the defender of Lady Chatterly's Lover caught by the photographer in mid firm stride on her way to the Old Bailey. But as a novelist? The literary instruments of these evaluations, like their subjects, come in pairs: a book of traditional academic criticism about each woman, and one each in a genre midway between criticism and popular biography, designed for the general reader. Orel and Davidson, the traditional scholars, both follow a chronological plan treating the major works of their authors in order and offering both interpretive readings of selected texts and evidence of such academic concerns as thematic unity (Orel) or development (Davidson); both press the case for the heretofore undervalued merits of this work. The more popular books are written for a new series by Penguin called Lives of Modern Women, described by the General Editor, Emma Tennant, as "a series of short biographies by distinguished writers of significant twentieth-century women whose lives, ideas, struggles, and creative talents contributed something new to a world in transition." Other publishers—Virago, Rutgers—are mounting similar series on women writers. Both biographies treat their subjects as exemplary "modern women." In the case of Rebecca West, the result is a pretty drastic reshaping of the material. Thus we have a woman who lived ninety years and wrote an immense lot of journalism, history, fiction, and criticism of all kinds presented by Fay Weldon as the Unwed Mother, the intellectually gifted unwed mother. Weldon's entire book is set in the furnished room of Cicily Fairfield in a boarding house in Hunstanton, Norfolk, whither she has retired to have her illegitimate baby. Weldon composes "letters from the future" to the young woman in this very model of a modern predicament, and in these letters she contemplates the state of society from the point of view of West's later feminist writings. West is seen to have been brave and ahead of her time, and a pleasant story develops, loosely based on the West biography, of how our heroine must feel, lying there with her extraordinary mind passing back and forth over the warp and woof of her very ordinary situation. It is gratifying to recall as we read that the "fallen woman" later rose to the heights of venerated moral authority. Completed by hindsight, it is a happy, over-simplified [End Page 672] tale, but it could almost be about any well-connected girl in the same situation...

Illegitimacy in Aberdeen.

SummarySince the 1960s, illegitimacy rates in Britain have increased and it is likely that the rise is related to a changing meaning of illegitimacy. Three cohorts of women bearing illegitimate babies in Aberdeen are studied in order to explore the social context of illegitimacy over the period of rising illegitimacy rates. One cohort of women bore their babies in 1954, a second cohort in 1964 and the third cohort in 1974. By using three sources of official data in conjunction—birth registrations, marriage registrations and hospital records—an effort is made to construct the careers of these women and thereby to obtain some insight into the circumstances in which illegitimacy occurs. It is found that there is a continuing pattern of women who bear illegitimate babies being young, single and primiparous, that the rates of marriage and timing of marriage after delivery of an illegitimate child for all three cohorts are similar and that there is no evidence of an increased incidence of cohabitation. More and better types of data on illegitimacy are needed to supplement the existing stock of official data.

Feminine Endings. And Beginnings: Margaret Drabble's "The Waterfall"

Margaret Drabble has called her fifth novel, The Waterfall (1969), most female of all my books.' In it, she tacitly refutes Simone de Beauvoir's contention that there is no such thing as feminine. This is particularly interesting in light of Drabble's early attraction to de Beauvoir's feminism, which she first encountered as an undergraduate at Cambridge in the sixties where she read The Second Sex and was profoundly affected by it.2 Indeed, Drabble's first three novels A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965)may be read as a translation into fictional form of Part II of The Second Sex, which charts the typical development of a woman in a patriarchal society. In those novels, says Drabble, I wrote about the situation of being a womanbeing stuck with a baby, or having an illegitimate baby, or being stuck with a marriage where you couldn't have a job.3 De Beauvoir's classic analysis of the situation of women denies the ontological validity of the concept of femininity. Instead, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has pointed out, The Second Sex insists that

Abortion, illegitimacy, and the American birth rate.

In sum, it appears that legal abortion depressed overall fertility, but particularly illegitimate fertility, by giving women an opportunity to terminate their pregnancies when other means of birth control either had not been used or had failed. If legalized abortion had not been available, an estimated additional 39,000 illegitimate babies and 28,000 legitimate babies would have been born in 1971 in the United States. While this makes up a small part of total births (3,500,000), the illegitimate births prevented represent almost onetenth of all out-of-wedlock children born in the country in that year. In addition to preventing these births the legalization of abortion appears to have reduced the incidence of pregnancy-related marriages and thereby may have helped to limit subsequent marital disruption. Finally, legal abortion prevented large numbers of illegal abortions from occurring. Our data indicate that well over half-most likely between two-thirds and three-fourths-of all legal abortions in the United States in 1971 were replacements for illegal abortions. Further declines in illegitimate birth rates for the country as a whole will depend, in considerable part, on the extent to which legal abortion becomes more readily available and more widely used. Theoretically, greater use of efficient contraception could also cause illegitimate fertility to decline. But there are many reasons why women do not use efficient contraception even when they know about it and have access to the materials (25). Even though the use of abortion throughout the nation is now legalized by the Supreme Court decision, this does not necessarily mean that services will in fact be everywhere more readily available. Our interstate analysis suggests that should the liberalization of abortion laws be reversed, not only would there be an upturn in illegal abortions and pregnancy-related marriages, but also a marked rise in illegitimacy, particularly among women who do not have the means to obtain an illegal abortion.

Study of applicants for abortion at the Royal Northern Hospital, London.

In the second and third quarters of 1970, 155 women applied for abortion to two of the three consultant gynaecologists at the Royal Northern Hospital, London. Of the applicants, 100 were single, forty-two married and thirteen widowed, divorced or separated (WDS). The single women came disproportionately from larger than average families, and fifty-eight were from broken or unhappy homes. Of the total sample, 39% were Church of England and 30% Roman Catholic. By occupation, the largest group was of semi-skilled or unskilled workers (thirty-seven) and the smallest one of professional women (seven). Less than half were Britishborn and one-third were from the Commonwealth. More than half had never attempted to use any method of contraception. The 155 patients between them had had fourteen previous abortions and twenty-five illegitimate children.Of the 155 women, seventy-one single, twenty-three married and eight WDS obtained an abortion, this proportion of single women being considerably higher than the national average. So also was the proportion of women in the age range 20–34 years. Slightly more women who were Britishborn and C of E by religion obtained abortion than were represented in the sample as a whole. A number of clinic and hospital details were recorded, such as stage of pregnancy at first hospital interview and at abortion, delay in securing hospital appointment and bed. A follow-up, about 18 months later, showed that nearly all the women were glad they had had an abortion; very few had experienced serious depression, feelings of guilt or religious problems afterwards. Most of the women who needed it were now using birth control, mostly the pill. Three patients became pregnant again within a year of their termination. One had a miscarriage and one (a schoolgirl) had a second termination. The third applied for a second abortion, but was refused.Fifty-three women, approximately one-third, did not have a hospital abortion, but only fifteen of these were categorically refused; the others had spontaneous or private abortions, changed their minds after interview or failed to appear for the operation. Of the fifteen, seven were refused because the pregnancy was too far advanced. Two girls were refused because they had had previous unwanted pregnancies, but had not used contraception on this occasion; one of these was 19 years old and already had had two abortions and an illegitimate baby. The remaining six were refused for various reasons.Some general conclusions are drawn from the survey and some recommendations made.

Ophthalmia neonatorum in Glasgow.

A retrospective clinical and epidemiological comparison was made between gonococcal and non-gonococcal ophthalmia neonatorum in Glasgow from 1963 to 1968. Both forms of the disease were fairly mild, responding well to either topical or systemic antibiotic therapy. Neisseria gonorrhoeae was the commonest cause of ophthalmia neonatorum during the period studied. Illegitimate babies, those born in certain hospitals or in their own homes and those whose homes were in the inner suburbs had the highest incidence of gonococcal ophthalmia, and it is suggested that prophylaxis be re-introduced for those babies at greatest risk.