Busy Morning: A Background Reference to What I Wrote Yesterday And The Moral Fraud That Modernism Is

Looking over the things I wrote about the "scandal" bashing Nuns for dumping "800 bodies of babies into a septic tank"  I found that I'd cited an older story FROM THE BBC that noted that in the very period in question, infant mortality was extremely high in Britain.  Maybe if their reporters bothered to look at their own website, they'd find stuff like this.  Note, especially  these two paragraphs from their reporting of this latest, alleged scandal and what their older report said about children dying in that period

The death records indicate that most of the children died of natural causes, from diseases common at the time such as TB, pneumonia and pleurisy.

Analysis of the records show that a third of those who died were aged five or under. Very few of those who died, 24 in total, were aged over 15, and most of the deaths occurred between 1870 and 1930.


Health: Latest News

Before the revolution 

In the 30s, one in 20 children died before their first birthday 

Sixty years ago, Britain's children were born into a dangerous world.
Every year, thousands died of infectious diseases like pneumonia, meningitis, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and polio.
Infant mortality - deaths of children before their first birthday - was around one in 20.
It took some startling medical discoveries and pioneering work from paediatricians and doctors to turn around an appalling situation.

Dr Leslie Temple: "We could do nothing"

Helpless and frustrated
The early 1930s were a time of frustration for many doctors who powerlessly witnessed the deaths of thousands of babies and young children.
"When I was a student and newly qualified, there was an enormous area where we knew we could do nothing," Dr Leslie Temple remembers.
"We made the most of what little we could do, but over the vast area of childhood illness, all we could do was hold their hands and hope."
Professional attitudes
Poverty, poor diet and bad living conditions lay at the root of much childhood illness.

Harold Everley Jones: houses were hovels

Harold Everley Jones was one of Britain's first paediatricians, and spent 40 years working with children. He qualified as a doctor in 1934.
"I stood in a house to which I was called and was amazed to see the wallpaper moving due to the bugs underneath. Many of these houses were little more better than hovels." he recalls.
Antibiotic revolution
It was only in 1939 that the world's first anti-bacterial drugs, Sulphonamides, became widely available.

Antibiotics like penicillin changed everything

They greatly reduced childhood deaths from pneumonia. Shortly afterwards, in 1944, Penicillin, the original antibiotic, was used to wage war on meningitis.
The second antibiotic to be developed, Streptomycin in 1947, tackled the horrors of TB.
In 1960, a vaccination to protect against Polio was introduced to British shores from the United States.

A child had a mirror above the lung to see behind

Mechanical aid
The iron lung was used for the worst polio cases, where the chest muscles and diaphragm were paralysed, and the patient would suffocate without assisted respiration. The machine breathed for them.
Simon Parrit spent 14 months in hospital, much of that time inside the mechanical lung.
"I won't say I liked being in it, but it was like a very safe environment that's breathing for you.
"My life was lived through a mirror. I had a mirror over the iron lung and you could see the world through the mirror, back-to-front."

Dr Beryl Corner: halved mortality rates

Premature babies
Post-war Britain concentrated its medicinal effort on new born babies; Britain's second premature baby unit was set up at Bristol's Southmead hospital, under the auspices of a leading paediatrician, Dr Beryl Corner.
With a measly budget of £100 - enough for just six cots - Dr Corner and her team halved mortality rates for the babies in their care within a year of being established.
Dr Corner also won fame and accolades for her profession when she successfully assisted in the delivery of the world's first quadruplets to be born by Caesarean; the birth of the Good sisters became an international news story.

All the quads survived

Last, but not least
The births were regarded as a triumph for intensive care, especially since the fourth baby was not breathing when she was delivered.
"We had no resuscitation equipment then such as we know it now.
"But I had a sucker that I sucked with a rubber tube down the baby's throat, and after about four or five minutes the baby cried and breathed; and she lived," says Dr Corner.
Speed of change
Few can comprehend the advances made in healthcare over the last sixty years.
"It's difficult for people now to imagine a world without antibiotics, in which people died of infection all the time," says Dr Leslie Temple.
In the decade before the polio vaccine was introduced there were 45,000 cases. Since 1985 there have been fewer than 40. The other diseases that blighted children's lives have also all but gone, or are easily treated.
The infant mortality rate last year was 10 times less than in the late 1930's.

Dr Temple says: "We no longer expect children to die of common disease or to be crippled by them."
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One in twenty,  5% of children died in their first year, I will see if I can find figures for the rest of childhood but percentage of children who died of natural causes in childhood was certainly quite a bit higher than that which was reported last weekend as being a scandal when it happened in a Catholic orphanage.   I will also remind you that you can read the paper I cited yesterday for more information about those figures and you can look at the truly scandalous science of the eminent and respected and lauded British scientist, member of the Fabians, Karl Pearson, The Intensity of Natural Selection In Man, in which he tacitly advocates a high infant and early childhood mortality rate as good for the human species.   Note that even Dr. Arthur Newsholme, who Pearson is arguing against because his view of the salubrity of infant and early child mortality doesn't attribute the level of benefit that Pearson asserted, even Newsholme blithely talked about it "weeding out the weaklings".  Such is the ingrained habit in Britain, long learned by the regime of hatred of the poor, the ill and the merely unfortunate which is incorporated in the class system and the law.  That is what Darwin turned into science through his theory of natural selection and elevated the deaths of such children into a modern virtue.

And he was hardly the only member of the English Language scientific, medical, intellectual establishment to hold that position, it wasn't uncommon in those who accepted the beliefs of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, not to mention Ernst Haeckel.   Pearson positively cites the work of Alfred Ploetz, in Germany, who had already become a convinced antiSemite due to his Darwinism and who would supply the Nazis with a good deal of their scientific support for their racial genocide as well as the kind he shared, wholeheartedly with members of the British elite, from what was considered the far right to more centrist icons such as Winston Churchill to what was, in contemporary British terms, the far left, such as Karl Pearson.  

If you want an example of the depravity of such thinking, consider that the hero of so many English language intellectuals on the alleged left,  especially among "free thinkers" and atheists, George Bernard Shaw went from giving entertaining speeches about the desirability of mass gassings more than a quarter of a century before the Nazis put his dream into practice, to writing his pathological preface to his late play, On the Rocks, which was, if anything, even more enthusiastic about mass murders, such as were happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin and as Hitler was in power and preparing his country for doing the same.   That such thinking was all the rage among European intellectuals in the rise of modernism is proven by their acceptance of Shaw as some kind of moral personage.  In 1925, well into his period of advocating gassing huge numbers in gas chambers, he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Here's what it says at the Nobel site, now:

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925 was awarded to George Bernard Shaw "for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty".

"Idealism and humanity" under the modern, scientific view of things is clearly quite consonant with fascism and Nazism as well as Stalinism.  Shaw is hardly the only writer and intellectual held up as a hero, now and then, as they favored fascism, Nazism Stalinism and on into the Maoist period and on to today. Modernism, with its Darwinian demotion of human life was then and as that part of modernism which was deemphasized in the recoiling horror in reaction to World War II fades , that is resurgent.  It will be as long as its pathological basis remains current in the general culture.

And it's the nuns they love to bash.