Essays in preventive medicine : the health of children, and the period of infection in epidemic diseases / by William Squire.

  • Squire, William
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays in preventive medicine : the health of children, and the period of infection in epidemic diseases / by William Squire. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/132 (page 31)
    [,Reprinted from “Our Homes,” with some alterations. By permission of Messrs. CASSELL.] THE HEALTH OF CHILDREN. A FIRST scries of observations on the variations of body-heat in infants and children, made, as a foundation for the study of the diseases of childhood, mostly in the ten years before 1865, has long been out of print. Further enquiries of the same kind led to some hygienic comments recently embodied in “ Health in the Nursery,” a contribution to the volume entitled, “ Our Homes, and how to make them Healthy,” published by Messrs. Cassell ; their kind permission enables me to add many ex- tracts from this later publication to the reprint of my earlier paper. My best thanks are also due to Messrs. Cassell, for the opportunity of including among more strictly medical essays the diagrams prepared by them at my suggestion, from vol. xxxiii. of The New York Medical Journal, of the normal rate and ratio of growth in the first year of infancy. These illustrate the way in which our first start in life is made ; they need to be brought to the more special notice of professional readers, as our medical text books give no standard by which healthy infantile de- velopment can be judged by, and it is but quite lately that the very constant physiological loss of weight in the first week of independent existence has been noticed in our medical journals as well established. Among the more recently acquired facts bearing on the sub- ject in hand are the determinations, by Dr. Percy Frankland, of the relative proportion of germs found in the air under different circumstances. These were brought before the Society of Arts, March 22nd, 1887. Fewer germs of decay are found in country air than in town air ; fewer in winter than in summer. In January, about 600 cubic inches of air passed through a glass tube lined with prepared gelatine produced four colonies of germ centres, while in August 105 were obtained in the same way. On May 19th, 1886, the air on Primrose Hill gave 9 colonies, at the foot 19 were obtained ; the number from air above the dome of St.