PEDIATRICS Vol. 30 No. 1 July 1962, pp. 145-156
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PRENATAL AND NEONATAL NUTRITION

Borden Award Address

Clement A. Smith M.D.1

1 Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and Boston Lying-in Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

MOST AWARD RECIPIENTS have made carefully planned and masterfully executed investigations of some unexplored nutritional territory, which they could fully describe at such a time as this. I can report only a few disconnected explorations which discovered some useful points of view and uncovered some awkward pitfalls for future travellers. While thanking the Borden Company for the honor of being here, I should like also thank the many colleagues who did most of the work of our explorations, the Boston Lying-in Hospital, which has been such a comfortable base camp, and the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children, whose financial backing has been so necessary and so generous.

PRENATAL NUTRITION

Our thinking about unborn and newborn babies seems to have dealt so much with other problems than their nutrition and growth that prenatal nutrition was often studied not by first intention but because of some special opportunity. Perhaps the most fortunate of these came when a maternal blood volume study by our medical and obstetrical colleagues provided us with babies whose prenatally acquired iron molecules could be identified throughout infancy, but that was an interesting side trip on a trail we have not pursued further.

Another journey began with Mrs. Bertha Burke's investigations of maternal dietary histories, which afforded the chance to examine a series of infants with much special information attached. The results of our attempts to correlate particular deficiencies in what mothers had eaten during pregnancy with the condition of their infants at birth were disappointing to those so recently stirred by the demonstrations of Dr. Warkany, that specific malformations of newborn animals resulted when maternal diet was restricted in certain nutrients at critical periods of fetal life.




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