510 PEDIATRICS 



embryology or pedology, a pediatrist who knows no dermatology, is 

 anything but a competent and trustworthy medical practitioner. 



The diseases of the muscles interest the pediatrist, the surgical 

 specialist, the orthopedist, and the neurologist, to an equal extent. 

 Many forms of myositis are of infectious origin. Amongst the special 

 forms of muscular atrophy it is the hereditary variety which con- 

 cerns the first. The spinal neuritic atrophy form the myogenous 

 progressive dystrophy, including the so-called pseudo-hypertrophy, 

 Thomson's congenital myotonia, and atrophy or absence of muscles 

 mainly the pectoral, but also the trapezius, quadriceps, and others 

 no matter whether they are primary or myogenous (this probably 

 always when there is a complication with progressive dystrophy), 

 are of special interest. I need not do more than mention torticollis in 

 order to prove that neither the special pediatrist nor the special 

 orthopedist, nor the general surgeon can raise the claim of owner- 

 ship. 



The relations of pediatrics to forensic medicine are very close. 

 Nothing is more apt to demonstrate this than the immense literature 

 in every language on infanticide and all the questions of physiology, 

 physics, and chemistry connected with that subject. The mono- 

 graphs and magazine essays of the last two centuries written on the 

 value or the fallacy of the lung test in the dead newly-born would 

 fill a small library. Much attention has been paid by physicians and 

 by forensic authors to lesions and fractures of the newly-born head, 

 and to anomalies of the female pelvis causing them. Apparent death 

 of the newly-born and the causes of sudden death in all periods of 

 life have been studied to such an extent as to render negative results 

 of police investigation and of autopsy reports less numerous from 

 year to year. Most sudden deaths receiving the attention of the 

 authorities occur in the young. There were (Wm. Wynn Westcott,in 

 British Med. Jour., 1903) in England and Wales during ten years 

 15,009 overlain infants; in 1900, 1774. In Liverpool, out of 960 

 inquests there were 143 on babies that had died of such suffocation 

 by accident or malice aforethought; in London, in 1900, 615; in 

 1901, 511; in 1902, 588. In London they had annually 8000 official 

 inquests, one in 14 of which were on overlain infants. The etiology 

 of sudden deaths would be far from complete, indeed the most diffi- 

 cult questions could not be solved except by the facilities furnished 

 by the observations on the young. Foreign bodies in the larynx, 

 beans, shoe-buttons, and playthings generally, even ascarides 

 (Bouchut), bones and pieces of meat aspirated during vomiting, 

 acute edema of the glottis, aspiration of a long uvula, or of the 

 retracted tongue, the rupture of a pharyngeal abscess or of a sup- 

 purating lymphoid body into the trachea, a sudden swelling of the 

 thymus in the narrow space between the manubrium and vertebral 



