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1910] 40
as mothers—so many of whom have never had the advantage of a training
as a child's maid in a respectable family, but on the contrary have gone to
a laundry or other workshop or workplace, where they learn nothing that can
be of the least advantage to them as wives or mothers—what do these women
know of the physiology of the breast and its milk? Do they understand
the injustice they are doing their progeny? Are they aware that for one
child, who is fed on the breast that dies, fully 10 w ho are not so fed die ? They
know absolutely nothing of these things, and the only way they can obtain
that knowledge is by instruction by properly qualified persons. Neither the
midwives nor the parish doctors nor the cheap doctors have time in their busy lives
to give it, aind, therefore, these mothers go without it. Only the well-to-do and the
rich receive it, and they as a rule practice it, and consequently the mortality among
their infants is small. The poor have no chance. They should get it, and
the time is coming when they will demand it. This by some people will be
called Socialism, but they who say so do not know what is Socialism and what
is not Socialism. It is not Socialism, it is public health administration for
the preservation of human life, which takes no heed of politics, and which
should not, and certainly in England, does not, know anything about them.
These mothers need instruction. Last year " The Bulletin of the Chicago
School of Sanitary Instruction," which is devoted to the dissemination of advice
and information of the Department of Health of the City of Chicago, published
an article by Dr. Effa V. Davis, which was considered so valuable and
timely that they have been re-printed this year.
" The feeding of a baby at its mother's breast is not so simple a matter
that it can be done properly without some study and care by those in charge.
More mothers could, and would, furnish breast milk to their babies with greater
ease and comfort to themselves and to their babies if their medical attendants
took moie pains to teach them the facts about the physiology of lactation.
"Some facts to be borne in mind are the followingIn Chicago last
summer fifteen bottle-fed babies died to every one that was breast-fed.
Mothers should be made to appreciate this fact when bottle feeding is contemplated.
You can dry up a mother's milk by putting the baby to her breast only
at long intervals, say morning and evening, or only at night. Such habits
will spoil the best wet nurse ever created.