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86
mortality in the case of wasting diseases, and the indirect cause of
the fatal termination of other ailments less intimately connected
with feeding.
It would thus appear that condensed milk is the worst food for
infants, that cow's milk greatly increases their liability to death,
and that all artificial feeding is attended by a high mortality.
Some of the excessive infantile death rate in the artifically fed may
with fairness be attributed to unsound milk, but the essential cause
is the deficiency in the supply of human milk for which no adequate
substitute can be devised.
The best and purest cow's milk, if undiluted, is an unsuitable
food for infants, and even when modified with care and intelligence
is no more than a makeshift in the absence of the natural milk of
the mother. Thus artificially fed children will always start their
life with a heavy handicap which can be lessened, but which
will never be altogether removed. If cow's milk is in its
nature unsuitable for human sucklings, it can nevertheless be
kept free from the added disadvantages of adulteration, delivery
in dirty cans, from which it is transferred to dirty feeding
bottles, and a host of other evils which can be avoided.
Public opinion is awakening to the necessity of a better
milk supply, and already in Paris the small milk can, with
the dark secrets of its interior, has been abolished, and milk is
delivered in stoppered glass bottles, whilst in Finsbury a system
is on foot by which the milk supplied to infants is controlled from
the time when it leaves the udder of the cow up to the moment
when the baby takes it from the bottle in which the milk was
originally modified to resemble human milk. Efforts are also being
made to educate mothers in the proper care and feeding of their
children, so that a great deal of labour is being spent in robbing
the artificial feeding of infants of those dangers which can be
avoided, and there is every reason to believe that the result will be
to lessen the discrepancy between the mortalities of the breast-fed
and artificially-fed infant populations of Finsbury.