Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum Page A

become good babies and progressively easier to neglect.”
    In a curious way, it took a war to change things, and a major one at that, the last great global conflict, World War II. Perhaps a minor skirmish would never have shaken psychology’s confidence so well. It was an indirect effect of the war that actually started catching researchers’ attention. Bomb fallout, the smashing apart of cities across Europe, the night bombings of cities by the Germans, the counterbombings of the Allies, street after street in London blown apart, Dresden fire-bombed into a ruin of ashes: As the fires blazed, as their homes and streets shattered around them, many parents decided to protect their children by sending them away. They hustled
their offspring out of the big-city targets to stay in the homes of friends or relatives or friendly volunteers in the countryside. In England alone, more than 700,000 children were sent away from home, unsure whether they would see their parents again. “History was making a tremendous experiment,” wrote J. H. Van Den Berg, of the University of Leiden. It was impossible to deny the emotional effect on these children; they were safe, sheltered, cared for, disciplined—and completely heart-broken.
    Austrian psychologist Katherine Wolf listed the symptoms: Children became listless, uninterested in their surroundings. They were even apathetic about hearing news from home. They became bedwetters; they shook in the dark from nightmares and, in the day, they often seemed only half awake. Children wept for their parents and grieved for their missing families. In the night, when the darkness and the nightmares came calling, they didn’t want just anyone; they wanted their mothers. Nothing in psychology had predicted this: Wolf was describing affluent, well-cared-for children living in friendly homes. It was startlingly clear that they could be clean and well fed and disease-free—you could invoke all the gods of cleanliness and it didn’t matter—the children sickened, plagued by the kind of chronic infections doctors were used to seeing in hospital wards. It seemed that having good clean shelter really didn’t always keep you healthy. The refugee children were defining home in a way that had nothing to do with science at all.
    Bakwin, by that time, was blistering up the medical journals. He had supplemented the signs at Bellevue that said “Wash Your Hands Twice Before Entering This Ward” with new ones declaiming “Do not enter this nursery without picking up a baby.” In a paper published at the height of the war, in 1944, he described hospitalized babies in a way that sounded startlingly like the separated children in England. The medical ward infant was still and quiet; he didn’t eat; he didn’t gain weight; he didn’t smile or coo. Thin, pale, he was indeed the good baby, the easy-to-neglect baby. Even the breathing of these children was whisper-soft, Bakwin wrote, barely a sigh of
sound. Some infants ran fevers that lasted for months. The simmering temperatures didn’t respond to drugs or anything the doctors did. And the fevers, mysteriously, vanished when the children went home. A doctor ahead of his time—by a good three decades—Bakwin won support he needed from his superiors at Bellevue to let mothers stay with their children if it was an extended illness. He liked to point out that with the mother around, fatal infections had dropped from 30–35 percent to less than 10 percent in 1938, and this was before the availability of drugs and antibiotics became widespread.
    â€œThe mother, instead of being a hindrance, relieves the nurses of the care of one patient and she often helps out in the care of other babies.” But Bakwin and Bellevue were an odd-island-out in the sea of medicine. Standard hospital policy in the 1940s restricted parents to no more than a one-hour-long visit a week, no matter how many months