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.

    276/320 (page 258)
    United States. Massachusetts, in particular, tried to better itself, and was the first to institute a State system of preventive work by boarding out its orphans and deserted children. Some good results were almost immediately apparent. In the important detail of in- fant mortality, a startling change occurred. In the first year of the new system, the percentage of deaths fell from ninety-seven per cent to fifty per cent. In the following year, it declined to thirty per cent, and after that varied from ten to twenty per cent. Still another effect was promptly felt. Where the old-time system was in vogue, with its large institu- tions which indiscriminately received undeserving as well as deserving cases, children were too easily en- trusted to its care. Proximity to the children and ease in communicating with them, as well as the seeming ease of reclaiming them whenever the par- ents pleased, made commitments to the asylum very frequent, much more frequent than was necessary. But where the large institutions were abolished and the children were scattered over a large territory, the feeling of parental care sprang up again, with the natural result that offspring were not so lightly aban- doned. Thus in New York State, under our anti- quated system, the community supports one in every two hundred and fifty-one of the population ; but in Massachusetts, with a wiser method, the ratio was reduced to one in nine hundred and ninety-five. And