THE WRONG BABY

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 264, 3 August 1932, Page 10

THE WRONG BABY

Mother and Strange Child MISTAKE AT HOSPITAL A woman who sent her husband to a hospital at Salford, Manchester, to fetch her two-year-old son discovered 24 hours later that the child she had welcomed home was not her own. Leslie Gregory, son of Mr. and Mrs. Gregory, had been in the Hope Hospital, Pendleton, for a fortnight. Mrs. Gregory received notification that he had recovered and would be discharged on a certain day. Mr. Gregory went to the hospital and took home with him a child which he firmly believed was his. “The baby was the image of my own,” Mrs. Gregory said. “He had the same fair hair, the same eyes and nose, and his profile was identical with Leslie’s. He even had a scar on the side of his brow similar to one on our own child’s.

“Yet I could not get him to- call me ‘Mummie,’ and somehow I felt he was not my own. He cried constantly, and nothing I could do for him would comfort him. I was in despair. "Little changes which we came to notice, such as fuller cheeks than Leslie’s, we put down to the good treatment he had received in hospital We had not seen him for a fortnight, as the rules of the hospital forbid parents visiting babies there. ’He would not answer to his nick-name, and I was in a fix.” After a sleepless night, due to the child's crying, Mrs. Gregory went with him to the hospital and said she believed a mistake had been made. “An inquiry was made, and I was taken into the wards,” Mrs. Gregory continued. “As I* passed along I heard a child call out ‘Mummie’ and burst into tears. It was my own baby. Leslie had recognised me as soon as I entered the ward.” Officials at the hospital said they were unable’ to say how the mistake had been made.