One of the most important factors to be healthy is your economic status! That is the most blunt way of putting it but that is the raw truth!
Some papers have even found that first responders from ‘POOR’ areas do not even try to resuscitate or try HARDER to revive emergency calls! Sounds sad and cruel but that is the reality!
As Robert Sapolsky mentioned in one of his lectures; even in countries with SOCIALISED medicine; there have been been a difference of care and health between the poor and the rich!
The famous adage WHEN EVERYONE IS POOR; NO ONE IS! Is actually never a reality! You will always find a gradation! There will be a one eyed person among the blind!
Then again this blog is not about that!
This blog is about a condition in which it was detrimental if you are RICH!
This was a situation in which if you are rich and can afford a good private hospital then your child is more likely to have a one way trip!
The term was called hospitalism!
There are two distinct meaning as far as the history goes and in both cases they are not good for the patients!
Originally coined in the 1860s, it referred to the spread of fatal infections within hospitals! By the 1930s, it evolved into a pediatric term describing severe physical and psychological deterioration in institutionalized infants deprived of maternal care!
Initially used in Britain, “hospitalism” described the unsanitary environment of early hospitals, which were believed to absorb and circulate infections, causing high mortality rates!
As far as the blog is concerned the latter meaning is the one which used to affect the RICH!
Pediatricians began using the term specifically to describe infants in orphanages and foundling homes who wasted away despite receiving adequate nutrition.
Psychoanalyst René Spitz popularized the term. Through landmark studies in 1945, he documented how babies in institutions who lacked human contact and “maternal love” suffered from stunted growth, developmental delays, and high mortality—a condition later linked to anaclitic depression!
Spitz’s research directly influenced modern healthcare. It spurred a global shift away from long-term institutionalized orphanages and changed hospital visitation policies, eventually leading medical professionals to prioritize parental presence and emotional bonding in pediatric care!
In simple terms, the rich did not have love to give which the POOR had plenty to give! Most of the times all you NEED IS LOVE! The warmth of a human touch especially a mother’s touch can give better results than the latest and priciest medications!
So you must only be that rich that you know people love you for you and not your money!
Hope that makes you laugh like jetha bhai!
Shubh ratri…
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