FOOD FOR INFANTS

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 33, 8 August 1921, Page 9

FOOD FOR INFANTS

Dr. Truby King is anxious to remove the impression that the Plunket Society gave countenance _to bottle-feed-ing for infants, and "advocated the use of humanised milk." The society has done everything in its power to ensurethat bottle.-feeding, where inevitable, should be carried out on the best and safest lines, and this fact may have led to the impression that it supported bottle-feeding. We have been asked to republish the following extract from a letter written by Dr. Trnby King to Sir Robert Stout twelve years ago:— "On every ground a chiltl should, if possible, be nurtured by its mother. Disability in this direction would be.rare if women realised the importance of fresh air, exercise, and rational feeding and habits in relationship to maternity The . presumption is always against a child reared, artificially, as regards health, - stamina, capability, and resistiveness to disease. However well individual children may thrive or seem „ to thrive in spite of inferior feeding — and the best of artificial feeding is inferior feeding —the results with children in general are disastrous. . . . Another argument against artificial -feeding, and one only second in imoprtarice to the effect on the child, is the effect on the mother .herself. 'The intangible mental, moral, and affective considerations involved are too obvious to need dwel ling on, but there is an equally important physical fact which should \be universally known. In the natural course of events a new being, .nourished up to the time, of birth by organs isituated in the abdominal cavity, draws its food supply after birth from another set of^organs distant from the first. The effect of this is to divert the blood supply and functional activity to the breasts, and the temporarily' enlarged abdominal organs then quickly shrink to their normal weight and dimensions. Not so, however, when suckling is evaded. In such cases the internal organs remain enlarged, and when the mqiher resumes her ordinary life various' distortions and displacements are liable to occur. To this one departure from Nature qur race owes a very large proportion of the special diseases of .women which ' are so characteristic a feantre of modern life.' " Dr. Truby King adds:—"Twleve years which have elapsed since the above words were .•written have only gone to deepen in every sense the convictions expressed at a time when breast-feeding was at its lowest ebb. Tho popular shibboleth of the day was 'Good cow's milk is better than inferior mother's milk.' Bottle-feeding was .almost universal and was generally accepted not only as ' fen inevitable accompaniment, of modern civilisation, but was often regarded as actnally desirable and beneficial for' both mother and child."