OUR BABIES.

Waipa Post, Volume IV, Issue 198, 25 March 1913, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

By HYGBiA. Published under the auspices of llie Society for the Health of Women and Children. I have just been glancing over a mat little book entitled " The Baby," just published in the People's Books series, and described as

A MOTHER'S BOOK BY A MOTHER,

For the artificial feeding of a baby a fortnight old the authoress gives the following recipe : —Milk, one tablespoon ; water, three tablespoons; lime water, two teaspoons; cream, one teaspoon; sugar, half a teaspoon. Give half an ounce every two hours (sa7 nine or ten feedings in the 24 hours). This mixture has barely two-thirds of the nutrtment value of mother's milk; yet the writer allows the baby only a quarter of a pint of it in the 24 hours, though the average suckled baby secures a whole pint of normal milk when a fortnight old. In other words, a baby fed as recommended by this University woman, would receive only a sixth of the normal or a quarter of what the society publications give for a bottle-fed baby at this period. As a rule it is a mistake to try to get an artifically-fed baby to take as much as a breast-fed child, until it has passed the first month. The baby's digestive organs need to be educated and framed to digest the full amount of any form of artificial food. However, this is no excuse for starvation.

Dealing with the above subject in a. book just published, an English physician says:— Many mothers and nurses overlook the fact that children require constant additions to their food supply, a want which the mother naturally provides when she nurses her infant; but with artificial feeding the necessary increase is apt to be delayed or forgetten. This means that for days, or perhaps weeks, the baby is not receiving enough nourishment, is hungry, and very fretful in consequence. There is, perhaps, to-day a greatci tendency to underfeed than to overfeed children.

Page 17 of What Baby Needs should be carefully studied by mothers and nurses, as it is intended to prevent the possibility of their underfeeding an infant, or failing to be properly progressive. CASTOR OIL. In every home there is a bottle of castor oil at hand to which most parents and many nurses turn as if by instinct. They " give ile " to children almost as impartially as the mother of Wee Macgregor, who never paused to discriminate between misbehaviour and measles. A similar reckless routine caused our mothers and grandmothers to dose us with "Gregory's Powder" until the world recognised that more harm than good was being done by such thoughtless drugging. It is a safe rule never to give a child medicine of any kind without a very definite and clear reason, and never to give a second dose except under a doctor's order. The less drugging a child gets the better. If sensibly reared a baby should need no medicine at all. One can hear the mother exclaim in astonishment: "But, surely there is no harm in castor oil! Surely it is the best and safest thing to give for constipation or when a baby is 'out of sorts,'or for clearing out the system when there is stomach-ache or diarrhoea. You don't mean to say that oil can do any harm ?" Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed with profound wisdom half a century ago: " A medicine—that is, a noxious agent such as a blister, an emetic, or a purgative—should always be presumed to be hurtful. It is always directly hurtful. It may sometimes be indirectly beneficial. . . I firmly believe that if the whole Materia Mcdica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes. . . That the community is still over-drugged is best proved by the fact that no families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries!" Now, let us turn to what Dr Moynihan (the leading English authority of the day on the surgical aspect of intestinrl disorders) is saying on this very subject. The British Medical Jonrnal for April, 1911, contains the following warnine :