Spotting the sick child

Spotting the signs of child sexual exploitation

Integrated management of the sick child.

Diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles, malaria and malnutrition account for more than 70% of deaths and health facility visits among children under 5 years of age in developing countries. A number of programmes in WHO and UNICEF have developed an approach to the integrated management of the sick child, which is being coordinated by WHO's Division for the Control of Diarrhoeal and Acute Respiratory Dise...

Life with the Mentally Sick Child

The sick child in early modern England, 1580–1720

Introduction One morning in 1630, fourteen-year-old Richard Wilmore from Stratford vomited ‘black Worms, about an inch and a half long, with six feet, and little red heads’. After vomiting, he ‘was almost dead, but a little time after he revived’. The next day, the boy’s father went to see a doctor called John Hall, ‘earnestly desiring’ his advice. He brought with him some of the worms ‘wrapped...

Margaret McCartney: After Rotherham--pattern spotting and child abuse.

Under my fingertips, indentations from a now obsolete typewriter flit like Braille. Medicine’s recent past was typed or written by hand. Flicking through these fading paper records like a book, one of my jobs is to summarise them onto a computer. And sometimes there is a pattern. Shortly after birth the baby is crying a lot, teething, unhappy. Something illegible is prescribed from the end of a...