The Children of the PoorRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
The Children of the Poor
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; Poor; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
but quite as happy, enjoy the sight of the windmill "where they make the
wind that makes it so nice and cool," the swings and the dinner, rarely
forgetting, at first, after eating as much as they can possibly hold, to
hide something away for their next meal, lest the unexampled abundance
give out too soon. That it should last a whole week seems to them too
unreasonable to risk.
[Illustration: MAKING FOR THE "BIG WATER."]
At the Health Home more than eighteen hundred sick babies were cared for
last year. They are carried down, pale and fretful, in their mother's
arms, and at the end of the week come back running at her side. The effect
of the sea-air upon a child sick with the summer scourge of the tenements,
cholera infantum, is little less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river
ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again.
The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is
hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and
an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the
mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that
the end is at hand.
Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St.
John's Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every
week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds
of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders'
turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where
crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The
floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a
member of the Health Department's corps of tenement doctors, who is on the
lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health
Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of
the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King's
Daughters' nurses, who take up the doctor's work where he had to leave it.
With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating
Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not
contagious is the baby's best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain,
unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if
there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For
those who need more than one day's outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside
hospital, three hours' sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother
and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh
air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and
strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free
play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day
while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on
board.
[Illustration: FLOATING HOSPITAL--ST. JOHN'S GUILD.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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