102 [2) MIDWIFERY SCHOOL.

This school continues to make steady progress. Year by year a better and more intelligent class of women is obtained for training and a gradually increasing standard of proficiency is obtained.

The Inspectress of Midwives, who is in charge of the school carried out her annual tour of inspection in November and December. She visited the Blue Nile, Fung, Kassala, Bed Sea and Berber Provinces. During her tour she inspected all the trained midwives and wherever possible saw them at work.

She also checked the work of the licensed, but untrained midwives, arranging for the cancellation of the licences of any of these who were flagrantly unfit to carry on their work. She selected 14 candidates for the 1929 class. These were chosen from various of the northern and central provinces of the Sudan.

Up to the present a total of 97 midwives have been trained. Of these 83 are alive and practising their profession.

They are distributed as follows :— Staff Nurses at Midwifery School .. .. . . 3 Omdurman . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Khartoum . . . . . . . . . . 7 Khartoum North . . . . . . . . 4 Berber Province . . . . . . . . . . 10 Dongola Province . . . . . . .. ..11 Kordofan Province . . . . . . . . 9 White Nile Province . . . . . . . . 8 Kassala Province . . . . . . . . 2 Blue Nile Province . . . . . . . . 5 Haifa Province . . . . . . . . 1 Red Sea Province . . . . . . . . 1 The towns of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman are now well served with trained midwives. In Omlurman where this work has now been effective for several years there would appear to be a marked improvement of the health of mothers during the puerperium and a diminution of puerperal infection and of the maternal and infant death rates.

In the provinces the number of trained midwives at work is too small to affect the situation materially, but it is confidently expected that as the number of trained midwives in the provinces is gradually increased a notable improve¬ ment in maternal health during the puerperium will be evidenced. In the mean¬ while the trained midwives scattered as they are and in a great, minority never¬ theless serve to set a standard of relative enlightenment in matters of midwifery and of home sanitation.

It is to the growing influence of these women that we must look in the future to combat the almost universal habit of Pharaonic circumcision, so cruel in its execution, and so fraught with danger to the mother during the puerperium.