Dr. Warren Hern: I finished medical school– oh and right after, in my third year, after my OBGYN, I was on a pediatric service, and my first term was in the pediatric nursery, the newborn nursery. I watched the babies, and they had different personalities. And then on the pediatric ward, we had many instances of babies that were battered and abused, and very young infants and children who were being admitted to the hospital for terrible abuse and physical battering. Our chair of the department, Dr. Henry Kempe, studied this and wrote a paper that described the battered-child syndrome, about parents who had children they weren’t ready to have, didn’t want to have, had unrealistic expectations of the child, and the kid was crying too long so they hit the kid, shaking it, or whatever. So many of the injuries that he saw were the result of this kind of abuse at home. And it illustrated to me that not everybody is ready to be a parent or wants to have a baby. And that things can have terrible consequences for the children. So these children we saw had permanent damage to the brain and various other parts of the body. They obviously couldn’t defend themselves.
