502 PEDIATRICS 



As long as they are taken by the profession we should not speak of 

 over-production. I attribute their existence to the general conviction 

 that there is no greater need than of the distribution of knowledge 

 of the prevention and cure of the diseases of the young. The litera- 

 ture of pediatrics seems to prove it. Not 7000, as before 1850, not 

 even 70,000 titles of books, pamphlets, and magazine articles ex- 

 haust the number. 



Pediatric societies have increased at the same rate. The American 

 Medical Association and the British Medical Association founded 

 each a section twenty-five years ago, the New York Academy of Medi- 

 cine in 1886. The American Pediatric Society was founded in 1889, 

 the Gesellschaft fur Kinderheilkunde connected with the German 

 Gesellschaft der Aerzte und Naturforscher in 1883, the English Society 

 for the Study of Disease in Children, in 1900. There are pediatric 

 societies in Philadelphia, in the State of Ohio, in Paris, Kiew, St. 

 Petersburg, and many places, all of them engaged in earnest work 

 which is exhibited in volumes of their own or in the magazines of 

 the profession. If we add the annual reports of hundreds of public 

 institutions, which are so numerous indeed that a large volume of 

 S. Hiigel, Beschreibung sdmmtlicher Kinderheilanstalten in Europa, 

 was required as early as 1848 to enumerate them; and an enormous 

 number of text-books of masters, and of such as are anxious to 

 become so, and monographs, and essays, and lectures, and notes 

 preliminary and otherwise, which fill the magazines that most of us 

 take or see, and some of us read we may form an idea to what 

 extent a topic formerly neglected has taken hold of the conscience 

 and the imagination of the medical public. 



Before 1769 there was no institution specially provided for sick 

 children. They were admitted now and then to foundling institutions 

 and general hospitals. In that year Dr. G. Armstrong established 

 a dispensary in London which was carried on until he died. A similar 

 institution was founded in Vienna by Dr. Marstalier, in 1784. Goelis 

 took charge of it in 1794, L. Politzer developed it, and it is still in 

 existence. Before the French Republic was strangled, it founded the 

 first and largest child's hospital in Europe, L'Hopital des Enfants 

 ^malades, in 1802. The Nicolai Hospital was established in St. Peters- 

 burg in 1834 by Dr. Friedburg; the St. Anne's Child's Hospital in 

 Vienna, 1837, by Dr. Ludwig Mauthuer; and the Poor Children's 

 Hospital of Buda Pesth in 1839 by Dr. Schopf Merei, who after- 

 wards founded and directed the Child's Hospital of Manchester, 

 England. 



Since that time the increasing interest in the diseases of children 

 on the part of humanitarians and of physicians and teachers has 

 multiplied children's hospitals. Most of them are small, but they 

 are numerous enough both to exhibit and disseminate the sense of 



