The Making of the Picky Eater – The Wall Street Journal
Picky eaters are said to be a newish phenomenon among children. An article in The Wall Street Journal gives some interesting history, from children being fed scraps to medically suggested bland diets to letting children eat whatever they wanted:
Doctors scrambled to find solutions. One of the most widely noted responses came from the Canadian pediatrician Clara Davis, who conducted a series of experi-ments in the 1920s and ’30s to see what would happen if small children, including babies, were allowed to pick their own foods. For her study, Davis was able to round up 15 infants from indigent teenage moms or widows and supervise all of their eating for periods ranging from six months to 4½ years, according to articles she published in 1928 and 1939 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and a 2006 re-examination of her work in the same publication.
The children were allowed to choose among 34 items, including milk, fruit, vegetables, whole grains and beef, both raw and cooked. They made some rather eccentric choices, including fistfuls of salt, and most were apparently fond of brains and bone marrow. Some-times they ate little, and sometimes more than an adult (notably, six hard-boiled eggs on top of a full meal, or five bananas in a single sitting). The tiny subjects varied widely in their self-chosen menus, but the idiosyncrasies evened out over time, and each child, Davis reported, ended up eating a balanced and complete diet.
Sickly and scrawny at the start of the study, they became healthy and well-nourished, she wrote, supporting a concept that was becoming known at the time as body wisdom. “For every diet differed from every other diet, fifteen different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal and milk diet with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she wrote. “They achieved the goal, but by widely various means, as Heaven may presumably be reached by different roads.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626509/
The Grace of Denial – The New England Journal of Medicine
This week’s “Perspective” essay is by a physician who has sympathy for patients and families who fail to accept a terrible disease diagnosis until well after it should have been obvious. Dr. Heather Sher insisted and believed her father had Lyme Disease instead of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
So yes, I am familiar with denial. When I see patients who cannot face the prospect of a terrible diagnosis, I understand their delay, their reluctance, their trepidation on a deep level — a level that perhaps only someone who has witnessed a loved one’s slow demise from a terminal illness can appreciate. In the face of a diagnosis for which there is no effective treatment and no cure, our denial allowed my family 6 months of relative peace before things became unbearable. We had a few extra months with my father without the constant awareness that his death was imminent. My medical inexperience, clouded clinical judgment, and desperate desire for more time with my dad extended our denial of medical reality for longer than is typical.
Today, when I hear detached descriptions of patients who’ve waited too long to address a devastating illness, I understand. “Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief,” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross explained. “There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.”
A Country Doctor Writes: 
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