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Progress in Pediatrics
July 1940

TO THE BABY DOCTOR

Am J Dis Child. 1940;60(1):170. doi:10.1001/archpedi.1940.02000010179011

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Abstract

My world is the science of medicine. Among my test tubes, serums, lights and microscope, I find happiness: a guardian at a crossroads, a guide along the misted road to health. Yet in my daily rounds there sometimes comes an hour when I feel an emptiness. The sense of sacred missions that fire the priest and preacher, the teacher and the nurse seems strangely lacking, for mine is not the laying on of hands. Then it is that I must go to other courts—where children laugh, unconscious of the horror of their twisted bodies; where fevers burn and wasting illness stalks from cot to cot. There it is I see him, between the beds, in whitened gown, so kindly, calm and smiling—the baby's doctor. His gentler hands will hold some poor wee human mite, whose whispered breath scarce dares return to tortured lips. With defter eye and touch he reads

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