Margaret A. Ribble: The Rights of Infants1

This little book is a healthy and stimulating challenge to every pediatrician, pediatrics nurse, and educator. Its spirit and its purpose is profoundly right. Its emphasis on the importance of the emotional factors in child care from the very moment of birth is sorely needed as a corrective to an era in which every mother and nurse has been encouraged to attempt to turn an infant into a clockwork mechanism, an era in which the only goal of child care seems to be to reduce trouble to a minimum, irrespective of what this costs the child's psychological development. Nothing could be more wholesome than the challenging picture this book presents to any young mother as to what constitutes the essence of mothering and what that mothering means to the emotional development of the child. No mother who reads it with an open mind and heart can ever again indulge in unashamed boasts as to how quickly after the baby's birth she scrambled back to her career.

The book is further stimulating to those who are interested in possibilities of improving the organization of infants' nurseries, because it opens up many avenues of speculation as to ways in which the infant can be assisted in the transition from intra-uterine to postnatal life.

On the other hand when one turns to the detailed physiological data which the author adduces to support her thesis, one is troubled. Sometimes the physiology is naive. Often it is dogmatic when it ought to be tentative. Thus the prenatal and early postnatal concentration of the blood with respect to red blood cells is precisely what occurs in adults who are accustomed to living at high altitudes; but this does not imply, as the author seems to think, either a relative or absolute anoxemia. Nor does the short inspiration and the prolonged expiration nor shallow and rapid breathing of the newborn indicate an inevitable anoxemia. In fact the whole picture of the relationship of sucking and respiration to anoxic states, though interesting and pro