h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not nutritional and so despite the idea of germ...wheat germ... something lacking in the white bread, I can't put that as an answer.

It does remind me of a story half remembered of the Indian Mutiny when a group of English Sahibs & their Memsahibs were beseiged for a considerable time by mutineers. Eventually the rations got so low they were surviving on boiled rice. In an act of supreme sacrifice the Indian servants would cook the rice, serve the English and then subsist on the water that the rice was cooked in.

When the station was finally relieved the English were in a very malnourished state. The Indian servants were remarkably healthy, because most of the vitamins in the rice were in the cooking water not the rice itself.

This is another of my part remembered stories, due to my not using reference books because it makes the game more fun, but which allows my memory to take me down the byways of myth and fairytales.

Germs.....a fear that the weakling orphans would be susceptible to infection and therefore were kept in isolation from the staff and as they weakened and died this become a kind of self fulfilling prophesy. The more that died the less the contacts?

Did they not pick up resistance to common diseases and/or germs in the guts due to the lack of contact?

Pebblederook +3 for "Isolation" which is what finished them off and "self-fulfilling prophecy"

I'm still looking for someone to draw it all together.. . I think by now you have all the necessary parts

Typically their final days would be beset by infection of the gut or lung, hospitals in particular and foundling homes were still dangerous places to be at the turn of the century but there's one extra ingredient to this sorry tale that was the catalyst and from the perspective of decades later - we can now see, the cause.

Not being turned in their beds.

Nope, it's more a principle than an action.

They weren't allowed to play.

Probably not but again that's not the reason.

No baths?

Don't know....I tend to think not as that would encourage exactly the opposite of what the principle I'm waiting to hear said would be about.

"Cleanliness is next to godliness"

They were washed to death

Actually you of all people should get the answer to this..

Oh. Did they have not enough bacteria?

hygienic dispenser. Soap? Carbolic?

TRiG.

The bedding was not changed???



GT

>Actually you of all people should get the answer to this..<

Unfortunately I still don't know where this name came from...

Nope to all of the above.

What belief could drive those caring for children to so act, in a way that they saw them wither and die and not understand why that what they were doing (or not doing) was the reason?

They were made to drink their own urine

For my sake, swap 97 & 98 over in your heads.

Eww!

Remember 9/10 foundling homes and slightly better in paediatric wards, something common to all across America was uniting them in child mortality.

Read back the posts I awarded points to the majority of it is there. There just one last remaining outlier of an idea, that underlay it all, and which was the root cause of most of the deaths in a perversely ironic way.