The Father of Child Care: Life of William Cadogan (1711-1797)

place them under one roof (as in Celle, though it is true they were divided from each other). He also tells how, in Saxony, it was seriously suggested in the early eighteenth century that lunatics should be shipped to the Venetian galleys or alternatively to British and Dutch colonies; and how either sheer fear of the insane, or a plain inability to cope with them, prevented the Mayor of Frankfurt-am-Main in 1738 from releasing the inmates of his town's asylum from their burning building. The chapters in this book vary greatly in length: seven pages on Roman valetudin-aria, almost fifty on nineteenth-century academic hospitals. They contain some surprises and confirm the old adage that there is nothing new under the sun. We read, amongst other things, of the gradual laicisation of hospitals during the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, of their siting beside streams 'in aptiorem et ampliorem locum in suburbia' and the generous provision of quadrangles for the laying-out of clothes and other apparel, of an operating theatre with a gallery for spectators (Munich, 1809), of strife between doctors and lay bodies (the universities laying stress on teaching, the municipalities on quick cures), and of the great 'rationalization' in early nineteenth-century Munich where 'curable' cases were transferred from a variety of small institutions to a new 'allgemeine Krankenhaus'-an important step in the development of modern German medicine. This is not a book to be read at one sitting. It is a work of reference which will suggest ideas to some and be used as a model by others. This is an interesting little book. The authors have done a useful service in providing this brief study of William Cadogan. In their preface they write 'Although his writings on child care are so brief, he stands like a Colossus, head and shoulders above his contemporaries. His main interest was in the practical management of infants and in this sphere his influence was immense. He did more than any other man of his time to advance common sense methods in bringing up children'. Cadogan spoke vehemently against the current practice of swaddling; he advocated the exposure of infants to fresh air; he spoke against wet nursing and against purging the newborn to get rid of meconium. He was the first to question the belief that dentition was a highly dangerous condition, causing convulsions, fever, cough, diarrhoea and other ills. His Essay …