Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/130

 fewer of these convulsive movements, and, in a few weeks, they ceased entirely, and a rapid amendment in health and strength ensued. I have often seen the same gratifying effects in the children of the poor, after removal from a damp and unwholesome abode, to a dry and airy situation. Nor can it be doubted that, for want of this, the tendency to convulsive diseases of all kinds, in children, is increased, and many lives annually lost, which, under other circumstances, might have been spared. We need look no further for an illustration of this fact, than by comparing the health of those nursed in great towns, with that of those reared in the country. Before the act of Parliament was passed, which obliged the parish officers of London and Westminster to send their infant poor to be nursed in the country, not above one in twenty-four of the poor children received into the work-houses, lived to be a year old; so that, out of two thousand eight hundred, (the average annual number admitted) 2690 died; whereas, since this measure was adopted, only 450, out of the whole number, died, and the greater part of those deaths occurred during the three weeks that the children were kept in the work-houses. And it is gratifying to find, every where, that the increased attention of the profession to the effects of management, and of medicine, on the manifold circumstances of children, in health and disease, has already reaped a rich harvest of reward, in the decreased mortality at that tender age. I have already extended these desultory observations to a greater length than I had originally designed, and I shall therefore defer, to a future