The Mother's Manual of Children's DiseasesWest, Charles
Science
The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases
West, Charles
Pediatrics -- Handbooks, manuals, etc.
meal, but that it should be emptied, washed out with a little warm water
and soda, and it and the india-rubber end should be kept in water till
again needed. To insure the most perfect cleanliness it is always well
to have two bottles in use, and to employ them alternately.
How strictly soever an infant may be kept at the breast, or however
exactly the precautions on which I have insisted are observed, sickness,
constipation, or diarrh[oe]a may occur, causing much anxiety to the
parents, and giving much trouble to the doctor.
It sometimes happens, without its being possible to assign for it any
sufficient reason, that the mother's milk disagrees with her infant, or
entirely fails to nourish it, so that, much against her will, she is
compelled to give up suckling it. In some instances this is due to
errors in diet, to the neglect of those rules the observance of which is
essential to health, as proper exercise for instance; and then the
secretion is usually deficient in quantity as well as defective in its
composition. In such cases the child often vomits soon after sucking, it
suffers from stomach-ache, its motions are very sour, of the consistence
of putty, and either green, or become so soon after being passed,
instead of presenting the bright yellow colour and semi-fluid
consistence of the evacuations of the healthy infant, and sometimes they
are also lumpy from the presence of masses of undigested curd. In
addition, also, the child is troubled with griping, which makes it cry;
its breath is sour, or actually offensive, and the tongue is much whiter
than it should be, though it must be remembered that the tongue of the
sucking child always has a very slight coating of whitish mucus, and is
neither as red nor as perfectly free from all coating as it becomes in
the perfectly healthy child of three or four years old.
In these circumstances, the diminution of stimulants, such as the stout
of which young women are sometimes mistakenly urged to take a quantity
to which they were previously quite unaccustomed, is often followed by
an increase of the quantity as well as an improvement in the quality of
the milk. It is true that a nursing mother may often find her strength
maintained, and her supply of milk increased, by taking a glass of stout
at lunch and another at dinner, instead of, but not in addition to, any
other stimulant; but mere stimulants will no more enable a woman to
suckle her infant better than she otherwise would do, than they would
fit a man to undergo great fatigue for days together, or to go through a
walking tour in Switzerland. A tumbler of one-third milk and two-thirds
good grit gruel taken three times a day will have greater influence in
increasing the quantity of milk than any conceivable amount of
stimulant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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