The development of the child / by Nathan Oppenheim.

  • Nathan Oppenheim
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The development of the child / by Nathan Oppenheim. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/320 (page 13)
    Multiply the proportions of the infant to those of the adult, and you will have a being whose large head and dwarfed lower face, whose apex-like thorax, whose short arms and legs give a grotesque appearance. The two do not breathe alike, their pulse rates are not alike, the composition of their bodies is not alike. The most ordinary analysis shows this. Fehling gives the per- centage of water in a very young foetus as ninety-seven and five-tenths per cent. This proportion, instead of being a permanent feature, is merely a transitory one. It diminishes steadily until, after birth, it is seventy- four and seven-tenths per cent. The decrease con- tinues regularly, but more slowly, until in the adult it is only fifty-eight and five-tenths per cent. Even the common differences that are characteristic of various ages, and with which every one is familiar, have their foundations in actual differences of con- formation. For instance, one may say that children are more supple than adults, but not merely because they are younger; it is rather because they have rela- tively a greater proportion of muscle tissue, and a smaller proportion of tendon. Thus there is actually less of the elements which make the body rigid. This change produces just as real an alteration in the physi- cal being of the person as the loss of the prehensible power of the great toe, the clinging faculty, and the sucking reflex, which fade away with the passage of infancy. Again, the common necessity of eating has