The history of pediatrics and its relation to other sciences and arts / by A. Jacobi. The foundation and aims of modern pediatrics / by Theodore von Escherich.

  • Jacobi, A. (Abraham), 1830-1919.
Date:
[1905]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of pediatrics and its relation to other sciences and arts / by A. Jacobi. The foundation and aims of modern pediatrics / by Theodore von Escherich. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    same time the practical statesman, the humanitarian and the pediatrist, is that of the excessive mortality of the young. The Paris Academy of Medicine enumer- ated in its discussions of 1870 the following amongst its causes: Poverty and illness of the parents, the large number of illegitimate births, inability or unwillingness on the part of mothers to nurse their offspring, artificial feeding with improper material, the ignorance of the parents in regard to the proper food and hygiene, expo- sure, absence of medical aid, careless selection of nurses, lack of supervision of baby farms, general neglect and infanticide. If there be anybody who is not quite certain about the relationship of sciences and arts, he will still be convinced of the correlation and cooperation of ignor- ance, indolence, viciousness and death, and shocked by the shortcomings of the human society to which we belong. Most of them should be avoided. Forty per- cent of the mortality of infants that die before the end of the first year takes place in the first month. That is mostly preventable. A few years ago the mortality of the infants in the Mott Street barracks of New York City was 325 per mille. Much of it is attributable to faulty diet.' Amongst those who believe in the omnipotence of chemical formulae, there prevails the opinion that a baby deprived of mother’s milk may just as readily be brought up on cow’s milk ; that is easily disproved. In Berlin they found that amongst the cows’-milk fed babies under a year the mortality was six times as great as amongst breast fed infants. Our own great cities gave us similar, or slightly smaller, proportions, until the excessive mortality of the very young was somewhat reduced by the care bestowed on the milk, introduced both into our palaces and tenements. Milk was exam- ined for bacteria, cleanliness, and chemical reaction. It was sterilized, pasteurized, modified, cooled, but no cow’s milk was ever under the laws of nature changed into human milk, and with better milk than the city of New York ever had, its infant mortality was greater this summer than it has been in many years. That hundreds of thousands of the newly-born and i Measures taken for t he purpose of obtaining wholesome milk are not quite new. Regulations were given in Venice, 1599, for the sale of milk. Milk and its products of diseased animals were forbidden. The Paris municipality of 1792 enjoined the farmers to give their cows healthy food. Coloring and dilution of milk were strictly forbidden, and in 1792 they knew in France how to punish transgressors.