We sat, horrified, until at last we found the “baby monitor” my son had left behind, the apparatus under the bed, the receiver in our TV room, to hear whether the baby was crying.

Toward the end of my tour, I was brought into a room where a three- dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor.

The heart-rate monitor in the six-bed room that houses the poorliest children is lying discreetly in a corner.