Caring for a child with lupus

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Janine Stanford

In 1902, an 11 year-old girl called Ethel entered the care of The Children’s Society (then known as the Waifs and Strays Society). Ethel and her mother were homeless; they were found by police in West London and taken to a police court, where Ethel was placed in the Waifs and Strays Society’s Beckett Home in Meanwood, Leeds.

When Ethel arrived at the Beckett Home, it was discovered that she was suffering from lupus.

Dear Sir

I am enclosing
warrant etc for [another child]
& I thought I had better
mention that Ethel [surname] 124
is suffering from lupus
though there was no mention
of it on the doctor’s certificate
that came with her

yours faithfully
L. J. Verren

Lupus is an autoimmune disease, where a person’s immune system can start to attack other parts of the body. Symptoms are wide ranging and can be either mild or severe.

Ethel was given case number 9103, and in her case file, there is a lot of correspondence relating to her health and her numerous stays in hospital.

Dear Sir,

Ethel [middle name and surname] (124)
has today been admitted
(free of charge) into the
Leeds General Infirmary
as she is suffering from
tuberculous ulcers on her
finger & instep & the bone
requires scraping. I will let
you know when she returns

yours faithfully
L. J. Verren

As you can see, Ethel was also suffering from tuberculosis, although it is not known if this was related to her lupus.

Ethel’s health improved and by 1906, when she was almost 16 years-old, it was thought that she would be able to do ‘light’ work. A suitable job was found for her and she started working in domestic service in Halifax.

Unfortunately, Ethel was not in work for long. It appears that her health declined, making the work very hard for her. In 1908, aged 17, Ethel left the job and went to the Waifs and Strays Society’s Nayworth Cottage Home in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex.

Nayworth Cottage Home was a convalescent home and it was thought that Ethel would be able to regain strength there. However, the medical officer at the home declared that Ethel’s tuberculosis meant she wasn’t suited to a home with other children.

Unable to stay in children’s homes any longer, Ethel went to live with her grandparents and her aunt in London, with the Waifs and Strays Society providing the family with money for Ethel’s medical treatment. The last we hear from her, she is in hospital in Paddington, London.

Ethel’s story is an interesting one. The Waifs and Strays Society tried their best to help her but the correspondence in her file suggests that they struggled with her medical care, especially as they had little experience of looking after children with lupus. Ethel’s experiences were probably not uncommon for the time. As lupus is such a complicated disease, it would be very interesting to compare Ethel’s story with the experiences of people with lupus today to see how medical care for the disease has changed in the intervening years.

Further information about Ethel’s story is detailed in her case file (number 9103).

Living conditions in Edwardian children’s homes

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Janine Stanford

When running a number of children’s homes across the country, it is vital that a good standard of living is maintained in every single home. For The Children’s Society [previously known as the Waifs and Strays Society] one way of maintaining standards was to periodically inspect the conditions in each home.

There are inspectors’ or visitors’ reports for a large number of our children’s homes, dating from the late-19th Century right up to the 1990s. When these reports were created, they were used to check that the children’s homes were running well and that the children in them had a good standard of living. The reports give a fascinating insight into life in the homes, the health of the children, and what living conditions were expected at different points in history.

The following image is a page from an inspector’s report for Gordon Boys Home, Croydon, 1909.

This page covers the health of the boys, noting what medical care was available for them and what sanitation was provided. Here it is stated that the boys were bathed every other night, with 3 or 4 boys using the same bath water in turn, but with each boy having his own towel.

Other pages in the report note what facilities were available in the different rooms of the home, the cleanliness of each room, and how the home was run.

Not only do these reports give information about what it was like to live in each home, they can also give some insight into what it was thought worth inspecting at the time. For example, from the above image it can be seen that in 1909 it was thought important that each child had a pocket handkerchief and two pairs of boots. Other parts of the same form check the children had access to a supply of Bibles and prayer books and that grace was said before meals, suggesting that the religious education of the children was considered an integral part of the life in the home.

Conserving children’s case files

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Janine Stanford

Today, we have a guest post written by one of our Project Conservators, Rebecca Regan.

***

Hello, blog readers. My name is Rebecca and I am one of the paper conservators currently working on the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project at The Children’s Society Records and Archives Centre. As Janine, the project archivist, has described in a previous posting, the project has the twin goals of both cataloguing and indexing parts of the archive that can be used to study medical history as well as of preserving the case files to prevent deterioration of the documents. Both these objectives aim to increase access to these records for researchers.

The conservation part of this project started at the beginning of January. Since then my colleague, Julie, and I have been ordering materials and tools, recruiting volunteers, establishing project protocols and, of course, making a start on the practical work.

Cleaning the case files

The earliest case files consist of bundles of folded documents; almost all of them being stored in blue envelopes. Many of these envelopes are in a very poor physical condition. Usually each envelope contains one case file, although sometimes siblings’ files share one envelope.

Rusty paper clip

The contents might be a single piece of paper or several hundred. Once we found an empty envelope; we don’t know why. The documents have almost all been sharply folded, most of them multiple times. Some are fastened with rusty pins or clips.

A few bear the hardened traces of what was once a rubber band. Most of the documents are very dirty. (They are now stored in boxes with lids but clearly that has not always been the case.) Many of the papers are poor quality substrates: innately brittle and acidic. It is difficult to remove the documents from the historical blue envelopes and usually impossible to replace them.

Case file with remains of degraded rubber band

In the short space of time allotted to the project, Julie and I aim to improve the condition of, and accessibility to, as many of these case files as possible. Each case file is treated in this way: we remove the documents carefully from the envelope and then we unfold, surface clean and press each sheet, if it is possible to do so safely. Some documents we have to relax through humidification before we can press them, because they are too brittle to press when dry. Documents written on parchment (the prepared skin of an animal, e.g. sheep, goat or calf) also require this humidification process before flattening as this material is thicker and less flexible than paper is.

Most of the case files contain only textual documents but we have also found a few photographs which allow us to see the faces of the children described in the files.

Charles North who was in the care of The Children’s Society from 1884 to 1892

We have also come across a few red wax seals with patterns on them. They provided authentication of an official document at the time, but to us today they also look rather decorative. We do not press any document which contains a wax seal as it would, of course, crack the wax.

Wax seal

Wax seals

Once the documents have been pressed, we put them in archival folders which are stored in acid free boxes. So far we have processed over 700 case files.

Case files in old housing

Case files in new housing

Learn more about medical history

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Janine Stanford

I’m happy to announce that our project web pages are now live!

The link above will take you to more information about the ‘Unexplored Riches in Medical History’ project, where you can find out about the medical records we hold here at The Children’s Society archive and how we are working to make them more accessible. There are also several scanned examples of records containing medical information, such as the one below:

This is a suggested diet to be fed to the children living in children’s homes. It comes from the ‘Handbook for Workers’, which was a book giving guidelines on how The Children’s Society’s children’s homes should be run. This suggested diet dates from 1934 and is an interesting insight into what foods were eaten at the time and what was thought to be a good diet for children.

Please do take a look at the new project web pages and see what other records we have.

Hidden Lives Revealed blog

Children in Care 1881-1981

Monthly Archives: March 2013

Caring for a child with lupus

Living conditions in Edwardian children’s homes

Conserving children’s case files

Learn more about medical history