(Discusses issues related to fussy and reluctant eating)
Discusses issues related to fussy and reluctant eating
https://www.amazon.com/Feeding-our-old-fashioned-children/dp/B0007FNG36?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007FNG36
https://www.amazon.com/Babies-are-human-beings-introduction/dp/B0007I9Y0W?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007I9Y0W
Charles Anderson Aldrich was born on March 4, 1888 in Plymouth, Massachussets, United States. He was the first of three children of David Emulus Aldrich and Laura Linwood (Perkins) Aldrich. His father, a native of Providence, Rhode Island, was a businessman; his mother, born in Plymouth, Massachussets, devoted herself to the rearing of her three sons, the youngest of them a semi-invalid.
Aldrich attended the public schools of Boston and New York City, where his family lived before settling in Evanston, Illinois. After several years of sales work, undertaken in deference to his father's wishes, he turned with characteristic single-mindedness to the study of medicine, his ambition from the time of a childhood bout with diphtheria. When his father continued to oppose his career choice after his graduation from Northwestern University in 1914, he worked his way through Northwestern University Medical School, and obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1915 with an excellent academic record while tutoring and running a bookstore.
Aldrich joined Frank H. Blatchford of Winnetka in general practice, first as an assistant, then as full partner, while continuing to do much of the X-ray work of the Evanston Hospital. After graduate training in 1920-1921 at the New York Nursery and Children's Hospital and at the Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Aldrich returned to the Chicago area and began what was for the next twenty years a large and busy pediatric practice. To parents with children under one year, he offered prepaid care, including periodic examinations, full immunization, and house calls. When prepayment later became a point of controversy, he defended it as essential to preventive pediatrics, stating that he had never known a family to abuse it.
Beginning in 1922 he held various staff appointments at the Evanston Hospital and at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where, in 1941, he succeeded Joseph Brennemann as chief of staff. In the same year he became professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Medical School, where he had taught since 1934.
From 1944 until his death, he combined the teaching of pediatrics with the study of the developmental and preventive aspects of child care as director of the Rochester Child Health Institute of the Mayo Clinic, a long-term experiment in the pooling of community resources for preventive psychiatric and child care and for community education in physical and mental health. His able staff made a series of important contributions to the medical literature.
A gift for clinical observation and a readiness for innovation are revealed in his numerous publications, which are devoted to prevention and to treatment between 1923 and 1944, and thereafter to the development of health procedures and prevention. Out of his experience in treating kidney disease he wrote fifteen papers on nephritis, proposed a system of clinical classification to facilitate its description and study, and contributed the chapter on nephritis to Brennemann's Practice of Pediatrics (1936).
In collaboration with William Bradbury McClure, he devised a simple skin test to measure edema, then a little-studied phenomenon. In 1928 he designed a test for hearing in the newborn, which has been called "one of the earliest attempts to utilize the concept of the conditioned reflex in diagnosis. "
In the field of nutrition, applying the findings of Arnold Gesell and others to his own observations, he discerned the existence of an inborn mechanism, now called the appestat, designed to inform the infant of the amounts of food needed. He accordingly implemented a program for educating parents to avoid even the most subtle forms of coercion at mealtime. His conclusions, published first in Mental Hygiene in October 1926 and in JAMA, September 17, 1927, reached a wide public as Cultivating the Child's Appetite (1927), which was revised and retitled Feeding Our Old-Fashioned Children (1941), with Mary M. Aldrich; a humanistic antidote to ultrascientific feeding techniques.
Even more widely read was Babies Are Human Beings: An Interpretation of Growth (1938), written with Mary M. Aldrich, a masterful presentation in lay terms of pertinent data from medicine, physiology, biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and education. To help parents sort through the mixture of folklore, taboo, and often conflicting scientific doctrine surrounding parenthood, the Aldriches presented the facts of growth and development as the key to understanding children as products of their evolutionary past, as dynamic creatures, and as potential adults. Compassionately viewing parents as buffers "between the young barbarian and the amenities of culture, " they argued that child-rearing should be a "collaboration with growth, " a series of compromises between the baby's needs and the expectations of society. Such an approach, they believed, offered a far safer and more certain path to healthy maturity than did pressure toward premature conformity. The Aldriches advocated the restoration of lullabies, fondling, and rocking--all time-honored customs rejected in the early twentieth century. They considered thumb-sucking a "pre-natal sport" likely to be prolonged only if the baby's routine was somehow unsatisfactory; it should therefore be treated by modified methods of feeding or handling, rather than by physical restraint.
Aldrich's articles in such journals as Parents Magazine, frequently the basis for the parent-child page of the Sunday New York Times Magazine (1946-1948), informed a large audience that feeding or toilet-training schedules enforced without regard for innate individual rhythms give rise to undesirable conflicts and sometimes to lasting disturbances of the sensitive, intricate controls provided by nature. To charges that he advocated "tyranny by autocratic children, " Aldrich answered in terms of "self-regulation" and the idea that truly spoiled children are those who, as babies, are denied essential gratifications in a mistaken attempt to force them into a regimen.
Pressing his heretical ideas with imperturbable good humor and with "a perseverance that never irritates, but never gives up", he contributed to a "revolution in pediatrics. " A recent historian has noted that the commonsense laissez-faire attitude that has come to characterize feeding theory is "directly traceable" to Aldrich and to his mentor, Brennemann, and that "the independence--in the best sense--of the modern American child owes much to Aldrich's influence. "
Aldrich was secretary of the American Medical Association Section on Diseases of Children from 1927 to 1930, and chairman 1930-1931; president of the American Pediatric Society in 1946. In 1929 he played an important role in organizing the American Academy of Pediatrics and was secretary of the American Board of Pediatrics from 1934 to 1944 and president in 1945-1947. His humanizing and liberating influence pervaded the pediatric literature through his active service on the editorial boards of the Journal of Pediatrics (1941-1947) and of Pediatrics (1948-1949) and through his editorship of the pediatric section of Psychosomatic Medicine from 1940 to 1947.
Despite the onset of rather severe Parkinsonism in his late forties, he continued to carry a full work load, making the tremor a point of interest for his young patients, until his death from pancreatic carcinoma at St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota. After Episcopal services, he was buried in Oakwood Cemetery.
Aldrich's major contribution lay in bringing child development studies into pediatric thought, causing a profound shift away from the rigid and arbitrary child-rearing practices that had evolved apace with expanding scientific knowledge. His impact on pediatric thought and on such representatives of the younger generation as Benjamin Spock, was enormous. His book Babies Are Human Beings, written in collaboration with his wife, has gone through many editions and now is a pediatric classic. Aldrich was president of the American Pediatric Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics, in establishment of which he was instrumental. In 1948 Aldrich received the Lasker Award for "outstanding accomplishments in the education of the physician in the psychologic aspects of the practice of medicine. "
(Discusses issues related to fussy and reluctant eating)
Aldrich was an active member of a number of medical societies.
On October 3, 1916, Aldrich married Mary McCague of Omaha, Nebraska, a graduate of Northwestern University School of Music and an experienced teacher whose interest in the nursery school movement meshed with Aldrich's growing attraction toward pediatrics. Of their three children, both sons entered medicine.
