VISITORS IN HOSPITALS.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 13738, 20 May 1910, Page 6

VISITORS IN HOSPITALS.

Should parent* bo allowed to sea i child patients in hospital? This is the '■ § question raised by the "Lancet."' Soroo Boards of Management have gone so far as to forbid tho routine of visiting • the children's wards by the friends of tlio patients, not, as pour parents sometimes think, from gratuitous inhumanity, bin. because the vistti art» very often a source of danger to tho ' .iratient. "It is very true." said a doetot at tho l/ondori llcspital, "that parents, and especially people of tho more ignorant classes, are undesiralla , visitors, not because of their suggostivo influence, or because they have an exciting eflVct upon the patient, but because they will not understand that sickness is not ueressarilv curable by - ghing the .patient something to cat. I ' had a child who was .suffering from a distressinc inUiraal coniplsint which, needed the most careful dielnig. and who invariably took a turn for tho worse after his parents' wecklv visits. We could not understand it until wo discovered that every time the child's mother came she gave him—-when the sister's back was turned —a dose of some patent •prepaiatton which she had been , informed Mas a specific for the disease from which tho child was suffering. You i cannot, convince, the very poor thati they do .not know what is hotter for ; 'their own' than the best doctor whoever qualified, and I should not like to § say how many children die, in tho l I conrxn "of a year, as a result of tbi.«* H tonndencc." m