Sir Dr Charles Blackburn & SDN

The origins of the Sydney Day Nursery Association had at least as much to with concerns of child health and infant mortality as it did with broader aims of childhood care and education. The 1904 Royal Commission on the Decline in the Birthrate and Infant Mortality was an impetus to the formation of SDN.

At the time medical care wasn’t universally available and the health of children in poorer families and families with working mothers (SDN’s demographic) were of significant social concern. In the early 20^th century medical care and health was centred around the knowledge and expertise of male generalist doctors who published research on everything from ‘childrearing’ to public sanitation. It was this culture that led to four doctors to be appointed to the first seven person SDN Advisory Committee. One of these was Dr Charles Blackburn.

These doctors assisted in an advisory capacity and perhaps their most important job was giving each child an overall health check upon enrollment and examining recorded statistics such as height and weight of babies thereafter.

Dr Charles Blackburn (he was knighted later) drew up the all-important diet sheets and rules. Leonne Huntsman wrote about Dr Blackburn’s SDN regime in ‘For the Little One’s the Best’:

In principle, SDN supported mothers’ breastfeeding of their infants; in practice, however, this must have been largely impracticable, and cows milk (by 1914 a mixture of condensed milk and barley water, safer in pre-refrigeration days) was given. Toddlers were gradually introduced to a variety of foods, in a diet that we would criticise today as bland and lacking in fibre and important vitamins (which were then unknown). But it was enlightened and healthy from the viewpoint of that time.

Caption: Pictured left: A young Dr Charles Blackburn. Pictured right: Dr Blackburn and D Henderson. (Photo courtesy of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.)

Charles Bickerton Blackburn was born in Kent, England in 1874. His father was an Anglican Priest. He was initially home schooled and completed a BA in 1893 at the University of Adelaide after the family moved there. He went on to study medicine in Adelaide while working three nights a week as a librarian.

After working at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney from 1899-1903 he set up a private practice. He remained there, eventually as a consultant until 1972. He began lecturing clinical medicine in 1913 at Sydney University which was the beginning of a long association which included his chancellorship. He fit in advising SDN among all this.

Dr Blackburn had two sons and away from medicine he enjoyed gardening and was a passionate golfer who ‘liked to win’. It was said, ‘he rigidly controlled his life and, though enjoying good food and wine, permitted himself no excesses’.

Dr Blackburn’s list of achievements is ridiculously long and for a good overview see his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography here. It notes that he “died suddenly, aged 98, at his Bellevue Hill home on 20 July 1972”. Apparently, he was still working at the time…