HISTORY OF PEDIATRICS 503 



responsibility to the sick and to the necessities of teaching. The 

 United States has been the last country to participate in these endea- 

 vors. The mostly proprietary medical schools did not find pediatric 

 teaching to their advantage, and it took the hearts and purses of the 

 public a long time to be opened. The waves of humanitarianism, 

 sometimes directed by a church, and the demands of science have 

 finally overcome previous indolence. There are many general hospi- 

 tals that gradually opened special children's wards. You find pedi- 

 atric hospitals in some of the larger cities New York, Boston, 

 Philadelphia, Albany, St. Louis, and others. It has so happened, 

 however, that real specialties have appealed more to the general 

 sympathy than pediatrics. That is why the number of beds in 

 orthopedic and other special hospitals are mostly favored. Practical 

 teaching has not been extensive. Children's hospitals that should be 

 used for that purpose, and that are directly connected with a medical 

 school, are but few. It has taken the medical faculties even of 

 universities too much time to appreciate the necessity of special and 

 well-regulated bedside teaching. In some instances lay trustees, 

 guided by their medical advisers, have opened their wards before 

 faculties have consented to open their eyes. At the present time, 

 however, there is hardly a great medical school that does not give 

 amphitheatre or bedside instruction, either in a children's ward of a 

 general hospital or in a special children's or babies' hospital. To a 

 certain extent the teaching of pediatrics in a general hospital has its 

 great advantages. It is not a specialty like that of a special sense or 

 a tissue. For the purpose of study it had to be segregated, but it will 

 never be torn asunder from general medicine. Vogel and Gerhardt 

 were both general clinicians. 



The comparative anatomy and physiology, hygiene, etiology, and 

 nosology of pediatrics have been discussed before you by one of the 

 most prominent pediatrists of our era. It will be my privilege to 

 explain, as far as time will permit, its relation to general medicine, 

 to embryology and teratology, obstetrics, hygiene, and private and 

 public sanitation, to therapeutics both pharmacal and operative, 

 and to the specialties of otology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and 

 the motor system, to pedagogy, to neurology and psychiatry, foren- 

 sic medicine and criminology, and to social politics. 



Infancy and childhood do not begin with the day of birth. From 

 conception to the termination of fetal life evolution is gradual. 

 The result of the conception depends on parents and ancestors. 

 Nowhere are the laws of heredity more perceptible than in the 

 structure and nature of the child. Physical properties, virtues and 

 sins, and tendencies to disease may not stop even with the third 

 or fourth generation. Hamburger and Osier trace an angio-neu- 

 rosis through six generations, the first case in the series being ob- 



