Children in Adult Intensive Therapy Units

From experience in the Northampton/Kettering area 9 to 10% of all patients in a general hospital requiring care in an intensive therapy unit were aged 12 years or under. Fifty-nine children were admitted to the intensive therapy unit of Northampton General Hospital between May 1967 and August 1969. Of these, 22 had been injured in road traffic accidents, five were surgical emergencies, five had meningitis, four status epilepticus, and four respiratory infections.All of the 30 families interviewed were in favour of their child being admitted to the unit, and none considered that the experience had had any lasting adverse psychological effect on the child. It is suggested that certain carefully selected child patients do benefit from the facilities of an intensive therapy unit, and for this reason such units must be designed, equipped, and staffed with this in mind.     

The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal

The historical record and examination of disinterred human bones indicate that venereal syphilis is very old in America but did not appear in the Old World until about 1500. Traditionally it has been believed that the disease was brought to the Old World by Columbus in the 1490s. The most popular alternative hypothesis at present is that venereal syphilis is really only one facet of a disease—treponematosis, appearing as yaws in the tropics, nonvenereal syphilis in the Middle East, pinta in Mexico, etc.—that is present wherever man has settled and has been his unshakable companion for thousands of years in all the continents. Unfortunately, the latter, or Unitarian, theory has no more claim to validity than the Columbian. The diseases mentioned are similar but we cannot be sure that they are all really the same. And the testimony of the sixteenth-century Spaniards, who knew Columbus and his men, that syphilis was an American import cannot be easily brushed aside. The hypothesis of this paper is that treponematosis, originally a single disease, evolved into several related but distinct maladies as man spread through the world and that venereal syphilis is the variant that developed in the remote cul-de-sac of America, from which it probably was indeed introduced to Europe with the return of Columbus.