SPECIAL ARTICLE

Abstract

NO ONE to our knowledge in this hemisphere before 1855 had thought infants and children were sufficiently different from adults to warrant special care and facilities for them when they were sick. This meant that no one had really faced the proposition that the well child—and this means a healthy mind and spirit in a healthy body—must precede the healthy adult. Only a few perhaps in the last century have faced, in the field of health, the potentialities of the bending of the twig—whether before birth, soon after birth, in infancy, in childhood, or in adolescence. Until the middle of the Nineteenth Century medicine was too much engaged in the saving of life alone to center its interest in the future potentialities of the child, healthy in mind, spirit, and body. And midway between the discoveries of the life saying procedure of anesthesia and the microbiologic origin of infectious diseases it was natural that a Philadelphia physician—an emissary from our western hemisphere—should be deeply affected and stimulated by the saving of infants' and children's lives he witnessed in London. The emissary was Dr. Francis West Lewis and his stimulus was the mother of all children's hospitals in the English-speaking world—The Great Ormond Street Hospital of London. When Dr. Lewis visited Great Ormond Street just before 1855 he was not thinking so much of the healthy mind and spirit in a healthy body as he was of the infants and children who suffered and died literally by the tens of thousands because of the lack of knowledge of the origins of diesases and of methods for their treatment and control.