Page:The elephant man and other reminiscences.djvu/57

Rh at one time or another, into the infant interior, as well as children who have needles embedded in parts of their bodies or have been bitten by dogs or cats or even by rats.

I remember one bloated, half-dressed woman who ran screaming into the Receiving Room with a dead baby in her arms. She had gone to bed drunk, and had awakened in the morning in a tremulous state to find a dead infant by her side. This particular experience was not unusual in Whitechapel. Then there was another woman who rushed in drawing attention to a thing like a tiny bead of glass sticking to her baby's cheek. The child had acute inflammation of the eyeball, which the mother had treated with cold tea. The eye had long been closed, but when the mother made a clumsy attempt to open the swollen lids something had popped out, some fluid and this thing like glass. She was afraid to touch it. She viewed it with horror as a strange thing that had come out of the eye. Hugging the child, she had run a mile or so with the dread object still adhering to the skin of the cheek. This glistening thing was the crystalline lens. The globe had been burst, and the child was, of course, blind. Happily, such a case could hardly be met with at the present day.