A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864.

  • Trench, William Stewart, 1809-1877.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A paper on excessive infant mortality, its causes and their removal : read at the eighth annual meeting of the National Association, for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September, 1864. 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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    that it is only when extraneous forces, such as specific contagions come into play, that the dire effects can be adequately realised. Measles is not to the healthy and the strong a lethal malady; but if it attacks children, weakened by the slow poisoning of a mephetic atmosphere, it commits ravages only to be equalled by the most deadly pestilence ; and so with all the other zymotics. The first effect of breathing impure air is low vitality ; then follow deranged nutrition, tuberculnr depositions, the strumous diathesis. And from this source springs a host of maladies, not merely consumption, tabes mesenterica, and hydrocephalus, but in the young the inflam- mations and diseases of the brain, which with convulsions are patho- logically the first stages of hydrocephalus. Nor can we practically separate the influence of scrofula from any class in the whole cata- logue of infant disease, whether it be manifest in bronchitis, pneu- monia, pulmonary congestion, or the various forms of atrophy and marasmus. Thus it is evident that if our children are surrounded in their young existence by hosts of maladies, there is given to us by a wise and benificeiit Providence, the means of defending them from the assault, or at least of mitigating its violence. It is how to use our conservative armoury to the best advantage; how most successfully to apply the teaching of sanitary science on behalf of the helpless innocents, that will occupy the attention of the members of this Society. It would be a tedious prolixity in me to recapitulate truths fully recognised by all who have thought on this subject, or to dwell upon such first principles of hygiene as the ne- cessity of obtaining proper space around buildings, of avoiding over- crowding of houses on superficial area, of securing good drainage, and removing middens and every other cause of prejudicial nuisance. These precautions, which belong to the external condition and neigh- bourhood of the dwellings of our poor, are very properly placed under the responsibility of official surveillance. Their importance is not only fully recognised, but, I believe, very honestly met by the strenuous exertions of Boards of Health. It is, however, in regulating the hygiene of the inner homes and social habits of the poor that the greatest and almost insuper- ‘able difficulties are to be found. By what machinery, either of science, religion, or charity, shall the idle selfishness of parents be changed to self-denying love of offspring? How shall we not only pre-