PEDIATRICS Vol. 60 No. 6 December 1977, pp. 809
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ON THE CARE OF THE PREMATURE INFANT BY LAURENCE STERNE AS DESCRIBED IN HIS NOVEL TRISTRAM SHANDY (1760)

T. E. C. Jr. M.D.

One of the earliest descriptions of the care of the premature infant is that of the English clergyman and novelist Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) in his preposterously comic novel, Tristram Shandy. Sterne described the case of Licetus Fortunio (1577-1657), an Italian physician who was born prematurely as follows:

. . . And for Licetus Fortunio . . . all the world knows he was born a foetus. [He] was no larger than the palm of the hand, but the father, having examined it in his medical capacity, and having found that it was something more than a mere embryo, brought It living to Rapallo, where it was seen by Jerome Bardi and other doctors of the place. They found it was not deficient in anything essential to life, and the father, in order to show his skill, undertook to finish the work of nature and to perfect the formation of the infant by the same artifice as is used in Egypt for the hatching of chickens. He instructed a wet-nurse in all she had to do, and having put his son in an oven, suitably arranged, he succeeded in rearing him, and in making him take on the necessary increase of growth, by the uniformity of the external heat, measured accurately in the degrees of a thermometer, or other equivalent instrument.