A little blue and white house, bright under a faultless sky, gleams on a slope of Mount Carmel in Haifa. A placard above the door bears the legend, printed in Hebrew and English, “Hadassah Medical Organization, Infant Welfare Center A.”
Inside a cosmopolitan group lends color to the large white room. Ladies from Bagdad, distinguished by their high headgear and Mesopotamian dress, slim, delicate Yemenites; Kurdish, Bukharian, Caucasian, Persian women; native Arabs, completely veiled in black, and demuro, blonded Europeans, all are there, together with a goodly sprinkling of sturdy, bronzed Chalutzoths, female pioneers. They have come for a lesson in the proper methods of bathing, feeding and dressing their babies.
The Hadassah nurse who instructs them stands in the center of the room, and illustrates her talk with all the paraphernalia necesary to the various procedures. She speaks in Hebrew, but she stops to translate key sentences into Arabic, Spanish and Yiddish. After the lecture, questions are posed by her audience.
ORIENTAL SUPERSTITIONS
One Oriental Jewess says that her Arab neighbor is responsible for the new beauty of her infant. She suggested that she rouge her baby, put mascara on its eyes, and rouge its lips in order to keep the evil spirits away. And the result is magnificient. Why has the nurse not advised the same treatment for the rest of the population in swaddling clothes? Emphatically the nurse tells her why. And the artistically inclined mother is impressed.
“I’ll take that stuf off my baby’s face,” she says, “and I’ll tell my neighbor what you said.”
That, however, is a somparatively innocuous manifestation of local ignorance. A disastrous instance occurred last summer, when a number of families came from Kurdistan to celebrate the Moslem festival of the Prophet Elijah. The shrine for this is a dark cave in Mt. Carmel–one whose lack of ventilation causes even adults to faint. It is a source of scourge, dysentery, measles and other diseases. To this veritable cesspool mothers come every August, bringing with them their sick infants for a miraculous “cure.” Despite the warnings of the Hadassah nurses, the Kurdish women insisted upon their ancient practice. And as a result of the pilgrimage, many of the children fell ill, and three of them died.
DRIVE OUT THE EVIL ONE
Other superstitious practices, such as pinning dog’s teeth and birds’ beaks to the clothing {SPAN}##{/SPAN} to safeguard them against the evil eye, sometimes fail. And then, the Orientals have another remedy. When the child becomes ill, they apply a hot iron to the affected part to excoriate the Evil One. They wear amulets on throat and arms, and rub garlic on their necks to guard against smallpox. And there are midwives who advise their patients to drink water from their husbands’ boots when {SPAN}##{/SPAN} delay in labor.
Against all that, in addition to the diseases to which the more knowing portion of the population is heir, Hadassah has fought. And the success of the enterprise is revealed by statistics. In 1924,115 Jewish children under the age of one died out of every 1,000 live births. By 1932, the number of deaths was reduced to eighty-five out of every 1,000. Tel Aviv, the Jewish city, has the lowest infant mortality in the country, with sixty-eight per 1,000.
FEW MORTALITLES
In the case of mortalities of mothers in childbirth, the Palestinian record far outdoes that of progressive, rich New York, Recent reports of the American Academy of Medicine made the comparison possible.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
