Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin.

  • George Catlin
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Shut your mouth and save your life / by George Catlin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Lunacy, and their spines to curvatures—or in manhood, their sleep to fatigue and the nightmare, and their lungs and their lives to premature decay.* If the habit of sleeping with the mouth open is so destructive to the human constitution, and is caused by sleeping in confined and overheated air, and this under the imprudent sanction of mothers, they become the primary causes of the misery of their own offspring; and to them, chiefly, the world must look for the cor- rection of the error, and, consequently, the benefaction of mankind. They should first be made acquainted with the fact that their infants don’t require heated air, and that they had better sleep with their heads out of the window than under their mother’s arms—that mid- dle-aged and old people require more warmth than children, and that to embrace their infants in their arms in their sleep during the night, is to subject them to the heat of their own bodies ; added to that of feather-beds * The weekly Bills of Mortality in London show an amount of 10, 15, and sometimes 20 deaths of infants per week, from suffocation, in bed with their parents ; and Mr Wakley, in May, 1860, in an inquest on an infant, stated that 'lie had held inquests over more than 100 Infants which had died during the past winter, from the same cause, their parents covering them entirely over, compelling them to breathe their own breath.’ —Times. The Registrar-General shows an average of over 700,000 infants born in England per annum, and over 100,000, which die under one year of age—12,738 of these of Bronchitis, 3660 from the pains of teething, and 19,000 of convulsions, and says, ‘suffocation in bed, by overlaying or shutting off the air from the child, is the most frequent cause of violent deaths of children in England.’