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warnings of the risks run by the bottle-fed baby, namely—a
liability to all kinds of digestive disturbances resulting in
impaired digestion for life ; a liability to rickets with deformities
lasting for life ; a greatly increased liability to die during the
first year of life from diarrhoea; a lack of vital resistance
causing the baby to succumb more easily to the various diseases
which it might contract; interference with the proper development
of both the temporary and permanent teeth with effects
lasting for life ; liability to scurvy; and liability to contract
tuberculosis by the ingestion of tuberculous milk. It may be
that the artificially fed infant will get through its childhood
somehow and live to be a rickety epileptic, or that "the
mother who wouldn't" will live to see Caesarian section done
on her daughter on account of a rickety pelvis. The first
steps are to make breast-feeding fashionable, and to secure much
more attention for this and other matters in connection with
infant management in the medical schools. The fashion must
be so changed that a woman who cannot nurse her own baby
will be looked upon as a poor thing or a cripple. Less will be
heard then of the inability of a woman to nurse her child.
There is overwhelming evidence that the digestive disorders to which many young children are subject have resulted
from the practice of feeding them upon certain foods largely
composed of starch. Hitherto no very great effort has been
made to prevent these foods being sold, beyond the general
advice which is given to mothers and nurses by doctors and
health visitors as to the harmfulness of them.
Some of these infant foods contain as much as 70 per cent.
of practically unaltered starch, and such a composition has been
held by a bench of magistrates to be not of the nature, substance
and quality demanded by the purchaser. One starchy preparation on the market was described as being suitable for an infant
only a few days old.