The archive of the Health Visitors' Association in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre.

The Association began life in 1896 when a small group of women, employed as sanitary inspectors in London public health departments, decided to meet informally to discuss common problems and issues of current interest. This small discussion group, then known as "The Women Sanitary Inspectors' Association", has gone on during the course of the twentieth century to extend its membership widely in the public health field, particularly among women health workers, and to develop into an established and important health service union, having recently amalgamated with the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF). At the outset, sanitary inspectors and health visitors were the two main types of women public health workers which the Association sought to represent. The origins, development and relations between these two professions provide a necessary framework for the understanding of the Association's early records. They can, however, be somewhat difficult to unravel. Although the early origins of health visiting lay in the philanthropic visiting movement of the mid-nineteenth century which employed the services of bibleor mission-women (the very first "health visitors" were appointed in 1863 by the Ladies' Sanitary Reform Association of Manchester and Salford), it was the infant welfare movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which really established this new profession, as a growing number of health visitors became attached to both voluntary health societies and local authority health departments which provided services in this field. Their duties concerned the health of pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under school age, and their role was to extend the work of infant welfare centres and other educative and mothercraft training measures into the home. The first two professionally employed women sanitary inspectors in England were appointed in the London Borough of Kensington in 1893. Their major duties concerned the enforcement of the recent factory and public health legislation as it affected women's employment and they undertook the inspection of the premises of dressmakers, milliners,