Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/98

 been the greatest there. It is the object of the following paper to take a cursory view of those causes which tend to cut short the career of human beings in the very threshold of existence. Nor can I conceive any subject of higher importance than the study of medical statistics, and especially of that branch of it, which leads to a more correct estimate of the sources of infant mortality.

At a period when pathological research is lending its aid in investigating the appearances of disease in every part of the body, and many nice distinctions in diagnosis are aimed at, which are better calculated for nosological than practical purposes, it seems to me not a little extraordinary, that so few have cultivated that most important branch of medicine, the study of the diseases of children. It is true there are some splendid exceptions to this, and, from the increasing attention of the profession to this department of our art, some valuable addition has been made to our knowledge of the morbid phenomena peculiar to that tender age; yet it is to be lamented that so little advantage is taken of the opportunities possessed by most practitioners, to investigate the pathology of infantile maladies, and thus still further to augment the resources of our art in ministering to the relief of this interesting class of sufferers, at a period of life the most helpless, and when the average mortality is the greatest. It is gratifying, however, to observe, that the practitioners of our day are more alive to the various ailments incidental to infancy, and a corresponding improvement has taken place in their treatment. Formerly it was too much the fashion to consign this most difficult task to anile empiricism,