A letter to Lord Aberdare, chairman of the Managing Committee of the Hospital for Sick Children / by Charles West.

  • West, Charles, 1816-1898.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to Lord Aberdare, chairman of the Managing Committee of the Hospital for Sick Children / by Charles West. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    while that of children above two, as deduced from 24 of those institutions, is 13.0 per cent. Even this number by no means represents the worst results, for there are hospitals perfectly well managed, in which the mortality under two, amounts to 40, 50, 70, and even 80. per cent. This, too, in spite of the infants having wet nurses, or of their mothers being admitted with them, as in the hospitals of St. Petersburg and Vienna, and also at Charkow. Infants received into all the Foundling Hospitals on the continent are immediately provided with wet nurses, and all whose health admits of it are at once sent into the country to wet nurses. The figures given with reference to the Found- ling Hospital in Paris, represent the mortality among those only, who were so ailing as to necessitate their being placed in the infirmary. All of them, however, who can suck are provided with wet nurses ; those who cannot suck are brought up on asses' milk; while the very feeble are treated like yonng chickens, and are kept in the artificially high tempera- ture of a couveuse, a sort of stove—a baby-hatching machine. In spite of all these precautions, which it certainly would not be possible to imitate in Ormond Street, the mortality under two, in the infirmary of the Hospice des Enfants Assistes, amounts to 52 per cent. The fact, too, that of 124 infants suffering from atrophy, or athrepsie, as it is termed by the French, 114 died in the infirmary, only 10 recovered, is a striking commentary on the sentence which I have quoted from the Report. This result, though doubtless unusually discourag- ing, is yet no matter for wonder to members of my profession, since we know, thanks very much to the researches of my lamented friend, the late Professor Parrot, that in the bodies of children who perish thus there are found ulcerations of the stomach, changes in the substance of the brain, of the liver, and of the kidneys, and in the very composition of the blood itself, such as are met with in no other condition. The mere collection of a number of infantswithinthe walls of an institution is in itself a source of danger. In illustra- tion of this may be mentioned, on the authority of Dr. Blasi, the Director of the Foundling Hospital in Rome, that the