Crib Death: The Sudden Infant Death Syndrome [antikvár]

Preface I became interested in sudden and unexpected deaths during my generál pediatric residency in Boston Children's Hospitál. It was at this hospitál that Dr. Sydney Farber had discovered two instances of undiagnosed septicemia in 1934; it was a well-established routine that any infant dead on arrival at our hospitál received a post-mortem blood cul-ture, in addition to a thorough autopsy. By the mid-50's, it was apparent that very few of these victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) had bacterial infection, and I became intrigued by Stowen's suggestion that, in the absence of anatomic disorders that could explain death, a reflex mechanism was the probable cause. Not long after I arrived in Seattle in 1957, the infant of a friend was found dead in the morning, and the death was described in the local papers as due to suffocation by bed clothes. I wrote the coroner in King County, who was not a physician, and his response was positive, and I felt encouraged. In 1958 I joined the faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine as a pediatric cardiologist, but my first "lobbying" effort with my Chairman, Dr. Róbert Aldrich, was for permission to give a lecture to the entire medical school class on crib death. (It was annoying many years later to have all medical school faculty castigated by Curran (1972) who argued that the problem of SIDS was not "palatable to the American medical research community," and that "little, if any, in-struction is given in the problem in medical schools"). During my residency, and after I began to take care of children with congenital heart disease at the University Hospitál in Seattle, I was struck by a few cases in which an infant with a mild respiratory disease would be discovered apneic