Office of the Hospital for Sick Children.

  • Hospital for Sick Children (London, England)
Date:
1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Office of the Hospital for Sick Children. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    advancement of medical knowledge, or for the instruction of the student, at all comparable with those which would he furnished even by a small Hospital. The only serious objection that has ever been urged against the establishment of a Children’s Hospital is founded on results sup¬ posed to be furnished, by the large Children’s Hospital at Paris; and is the expression of a not unnatural fear, that the high rate of mortality which is assumed to exist there would be found inse¬ parable from any similar institution. To a great extent, however, this apprehension rests upon erroneous data, and. has arisen from persons confounding the Foundling Hospital of Paris with the Hospital for Sick Children. Muguet, Induration of the cellular tissue, and several other diseases, which are often spoken of as though they were the scourge of the latter institution, occur exclu¬ sively among the infants of a few days old, who, neglected from their birth, are brought in a sick or dying state to the Foundling Hospital, and when there are nourished in part, or altogether, with artificial food. The mortality in the Hopital des Enfans, appropriated to Children between the age of two and fifteen years, is 15.5 per cent, of the admissions, while that in the Hotel Dieu, appropriated to adults, is 12.5 per cent.; or, reckoning the medical cases only, among which the highest mortality occurs, the numbers are respec¬ tively 17-6, and 14.3 per cent.* These figures do not show a greater proportionate mortality among the inmates of the Children’s Hospital than might be naturally anticipated by any one who bears in mind, * A small number of Children being received into each of the general hospitals of Paris as into those in our country, it may be right to mention that the above state- ment is based on the results afforded exclusively by the adult population of the Hotel Dieu. The mortality there is somewhat higher than in the other hospitals of Paris, owing to its receiving a larger proportion of severe cases; hut even in La Charite, in which the mortality is lower than in any other of the general hospitals, it yet amounts to 12,3 per cent, of the medical cases.