Virulent Diarrhea

Chicago is the home of some of the nation's foremost baby specialists (notably Northwestern University's Isaac Arthur Abt and University of Illinois' Julius Hays Hess) and the world's No. 1 obstetrician --Dr. Joseph Bolivar De Lee. He tirelessly preaches that, to prevent the spread of infection among mothers and children, all hospitals should not only have separate sections but separate buildings for the delivery and nursing of children and the convalescence of post partum women.

Chicago is headquarters for the three medical organizations which control the operation of U. S. hospitals--American Medical Association, American College of Surgeons, American Hospital Association.

Chicago is the capering ground of the most showmanly administrator of public health on earth--Dr. Herman Niels Bundesen, Berlin-born Dane, who as president of Chicago's Board of Health and by means of spectacular propaganda, keeps vast Chicago an exceptionally healthy city in which to be born & live.

Nevertheless, all these forces for health failed last fortnight to prevent an epidemic of virulent diarrhea from striking into the nursery of Chicago's St. Elizabeth's Hospital, an institution with no isolated facilities for maternity care, operated by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ. It was the nation's most serious outbreak of this disease. By last week eleven of 19 affected children were dead, only two definitely out of danger.

Characteristically, Dr. Bundesen went into action with a white mouse into whose abdomen he injected fluid taken from the blood of one of the dead babies. In three hours the mouse died, a press photographer on hand to record the scene. From Manhattan, Dr. Bundesen ordered 15 monkeys for further experimentation. They got out of their cages in his office and had to be baited with peanuts and netted with wire wastebaskets. This episode was also photographed.

More practically. Dr. Bundesen summoned pediatricians, pathologists and bacteriologists by the dozen (and was photographed with them hovering around his desk). As with similar epidemics in hospital nurseries of Manhattan, Seattle, Toronto, they could find no definite cause for the disease. Their best advice was prevention. Modern technique requires that every baby should have individual linens, separate glass-enclosed cubicles in which to lie. Visitors should be kept away from the infants for the first three weeks, the time when they are most vulnerable to virulent diarrhea. Above all, babies should nurse only from the breast when at all possible. The old medical maxim that cow's milk is good for calves and mother's milk is good for babies was strikingly upheld by the fact that the babies who died at St. Elizabeth's were all bottle-fed.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.