The Foundling Estate for Childhood
our dirty, 'noisy, dark and overcrowded London We still try to 'rear .children, and still fail, only too often, in the task 'upon which, at all times and every- where, the future of 'mankind depends. Here and there, in this London,- so deSperately Unlike the kind of city which the conscience of our day would build de novo if it could; are to be found some oases, such as the Foundling Estate, which has recently been saved from a desolating and ignominious fate. Here I wish to submit a suggestion which is strictly in accord with the original home and wish 'of Captain Ceram and With the urgent and 'ever-growing needs of to-day: Already, iii the close neighbourhood Of the Foundling Estate, are hOspitals largely 'devoted to the care of child- hood. In Great Ormond' Street is the most fainous hospital for children in the Empire : in Gray's Inn Road' is the Royal Free Hospital, a great work of mercy and also the clinical centre for the study of medicine by women in our metropolis. . Like all urban hospitals to-day, these are finding that their position in our dark and dirty London deprives them of the possibility of using sunlight as it should be used. So with great difficulty, at serious expense, on far too small a scale, they establish places in the country, outside the pall of smoke against which the politicians have lately made an empty gesture, where the vis inedicatrix Naturae may do her lovely work. Evidently the Foundling Estate should be used as a complement to the barracks-hospitals which we inherit from the wen- meaning but misguided past.
Better even than palliation and cure are prevention and creative hygiene. In many German cities now, the new- born are given baths of light, even on their first day in our strange world. The Royal Free Hospital is foster- mother to some twenty new babies every week. Surely, Mecklenburgh and Brunswick Squares were made for them ? Thus cared for, babies survive and flourish ; but how many homes and schools in Holborn have gardens for children ? Indeed, there is but one small churchyard —of St. Giles-in-the-Fields—in all this neighbourhood where children can ever be at school in the open air. Everywhere else they must be immured, including the infected and the susceptible, to suffer from the various ailments of childhood, which we regard as inevitable, but which the next generation will blame us for tolerating. This is a democratic age, but the idea that what one person possesses all should possess becomes a tragic farce when we apply it, as we do, to a dozen odious diseases: Let us hope that the Beecham Trust, the present owners of the Foundling Estate, will grant the request of the Holborn Borough Council to place the gardens of the Foundling Hospital at the disposal of Holborn
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