Dr. William Buchan (1729-1805), the author of Domestic Medicine or the Family Physician, the most popular work of its kind ever published, served as physician to the Foundling Hospital in Ackworth, Yorkshire, for a number of years.Writing in 1804 in his Advice to Mothers, he described the sad fate of over-medicated infants:About forty years ago when I undertook the charge of a large branch of the Foundling Hospital at Ackworth in Yorkshire, I found that the children at nurse had till then been attended by the country apothecaries, who, sure of being paid for their drugs, always took care to exhibit them with a liberal hand. Every cupboard and every shelf in the house was filled with phials and gallipots. Under such treatment, half the children died annually. As it was evident to me that this mortality could not be natural, I suggested to the governors, that the children had little or no occasion for medicines, and that with proper care they would thrive and do well. A new arrangement took place. The nurses were forbidden, at their peril, to give any medicine but what should he ordered by me; and were advised to rely more on the faithful discharge of their duty than on doses of physic. The consequence was, that the expense for drugs did not amount to a hundredth part of what it had been before, and that not above one in fifty of the children died annually. An opportunity of making experiments on so extensive a scale seldom occurs.
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