here is QUITE a story about diet and nutrition

back in the day when not even our medical professionals knew that much about diet and vitamins and the like. i found the story to be quite interesting.



NEW VOICES: georgie boy

We continue to madly work on The Book, with a brief trip to Vegas last weekend for The Amaz!ing Meeting. To keep the cocktail party lively in our absence, Alex Morgan, budding science writer extraordinaire, is back with a fascinating historical account demonstrating the efficacy of case-based reasoning.

In 1877 in the well-to-do London suburb of St. John’s Wood, a sixteen-month-old infant is dying. Georgie has cried for weeks, but now he doesn’t have the energy to cry. Too feeble to sit up, he won’t move at all, if he can help it. He can’t bear for anyone to touch his legs, which are covered with bruise-like spots. His face is ash white. His gums are inflamed and spongy. His breath smells like a corpse.

The pediatrician, Dr. Sumner, has prescribed chlorate of potash and quinine bark – strong general-purpose medications – and later syrup of iodide of iron and cod-liver oil. For the inflamed gums, he orders alum and glycerin applied locally. But Georgie’s condition only worsens. The swelling of the gums grows still more extensive, until the whole of the mucous membrane of the upper and lower jaw seems to be involved, and the bleeding becomes more profuse. Georgie begins to have spasms in his throat that cut off his breathing.

Children die in Victorian England. In the upper-class areas of Liverpool, according to an 1899 report, 136 out of 1000 newborns die before they reach the age of one. Working class districts maintain a rate of 274 infant deaths per 1000, and 509 slum children die for every 1000 born, all within the first year after birth. A very sick child like Georgie, not responding to treatment, unable to eat, having difficulty breathing, is expected to die. But he gets a lucky break.

His pediatrician asks Dr. Walter Cheadle from London’s Hospital for Sick Children to consider the case. An unusually shy man, Dr. Cheadle avoids the clubs and dinner parties of his social class, but he is appreciated by his students and patients for his courtesy and concern..........