Life for the Premature Baby

to prematurity or its causes in obstetric or paediatric literature prior to this century, except in Paris where the first modern infant incubator was installed by Tarnier in 1880 at the Maternity Hospital. It was big enough to hold several children and designed from a chicken incubator by the Director of the Zoo. Prematurity is now one of the outstanding paediatric problems and it is an important reflection on advances in Child Health that this is essentially a problem of the last two decades. The lack of previous interest in the subject is little wonder when it is realized that 250 years ago, when the City of London Lying-in Hospital was opened, 1 in 15 of all infants born alive died before leaving the hospital, and only fifty years ago in 1899, 163 of every 1000 infants born alive in