Alcohol & childhood : the medical and surgical aspect of the question being the report of the afternoon conference held at Sion College, His Grace the Duke of Westminster, K.G., in the chair.

Date:
[1890?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Alcohol & childhood : the medical and surgical aspect of the question being the report of the afternoon conference held at Sion College, His Grace the Duke of Westminster, K.G., in the chair. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/42 (page 33)
    ( 38 ) tion to their existence and importance, and thus to stimulate public opinion into action for their prevention, I may, without further preface, briefly recapitulate what has been impressed on myself by upwards of a quarter of a century’s experience as a Physician in hospital and private practice with reference to the appalling and far- reaching ills occasioned by Alcoholism in youth. . . . Many of the consequences of the increasing intemperance of both sexes, and of all classes of modern society, are now as well recognised in medical practice as others are on the popular Temperance platform, or in the daily proceedings of our criminal tribunals. Largely as it has been dis¬ cussed from all these points of view, this many-sided topic still, however, unfortunately appears inexhaustible ; and its importance is very distinctly evinced in certain develop¬ ments of Alcoholism in childhood, which have come under my observation in the hospitals w7ith which I am con¬ nected, and which, as far as I am aware, have not been previously noticed by other writers. Elsewhere I pointed out that something like a fourth of all the children bom in these countries die within the first year, and of those who outlive this period, another fifth die before the com¬ pletion of their tenth year. Nor does this terrible death- rate by any means represent the full consequences of the hygienic mismanagement of infancy and childhood, which are as obvious in the causation of many of the non- immediately fatal diseases by which the fairest portion of existence is too often embittered, and to the mitigation of which our hospital is subservient. These facts surely call for consideration as a matter of public and social, no less than of medical, interest; this mortality being such, that in the words of an old writer: “ It is impossible to con¬ ceive it may not be traced to some mismanagement, since it is utterly inconsistent with the uniform goodness of the Creator tc‘ Oppose that so many children are brought into the world only that they may die at an early period of their existence.” I mav therefore here again briefly refer to one of the most frequent and preventible factors of child death disclosed by experience in my hospital. Of these causes, the most important are strumous and tubercular c