During The 19th Century More Than Half Of The ...

During the 19th century more than half of the infants died in their first year of life from a disease called marasmus, a Greek word meaning “wasting away.” As late as the 1920’s …the death rate for infants under one year of age in various U.S. foundling institutions was close to 100%! Dr. Henry Chapin’s detective work on this alarming phenomenon is a fascinating tale.

A distinguished New York pediatrician, Dr. Chapin noted that the infants were kept in sterile, neat, tidy wards, but were rarely picked up. Chapin brought in women to hold babies, coo to them, and stroke them, and the mortality rate dropped drastically.

Who was responsible for all those babies who had died unnecessarily? Not the foundling home directors, for they were operating on the best “scientific” information available to them. The real villain was one Emmett Holt Sr., professor of pediatrics at Columbia University. Holt was the author of the booklet The Care and Feeding of Children, which was first published in 1894 and was in its 15th edition in 1935. During its long ascendancy, it was the supreme authority, the Dr. Spock of its time. And it is in this book that the author urged mothers to abolish the cradle and refuse to pick up the baby when it cried, for fear of spoiling it with too much handling. Tender loving care would have been considered “unscientific.”

We now know that small children become irritable and hyperactive without adequate body contact. In various experiments with normal and subnormal youngsters, those who had the most physical contact with parents or attendants learned to walk and talk earliest and had the highest IQs.

Alan Loy McGinnis, The Friendship Factor (Minneapolis: Augsburg Pub. House, 1979), 86.