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13
Sometimes the nurse may prepare food for the father and elder
children—if she does, she expects beer money. Generally the
father gets his food outside in a coffee shop—while the children
are either fed by the eldest of them, who may be only 12 or even
10 years old, or they are received at meal times at the table of a
relative or near neighbour.
Some of the more considerate "nurses" scrub the floor, wash
the household utensils, come in at 3 p.m. to give the mother a cup
of tea, and toast, and at 7 p.m. to give her gruel. They are
responsible for many of the foolish practices which obtain in the
borough. They are expected to wash the baby, and in so doing
wrongly pull away the cord prematurely, leaving an open
wound, which they dress improperly with Fuller's earth or with
burnt rag. They are eager to give the newly-born baby butter
and castor oil, and worry the mother unnecessarily because "its
little bowels hasn't acted." They bathe its eyes with stale milk
and water, regarding this treatment as a specific for enabling it to
"get the sight into its head." They look with indifference upon
"thrush." One "nurse" averred that "Thrush was a natural
complaint with babies, and showed their stomachs was working
all right;" she had had 13 children and they had all had thrush.
By the Midwives' Act, 1902, they are forbidden to act as midwives
save under circumstances of great emergency, but there is
no doubt that many do so act; staying with the mother during her
labour until the child is born, and endeavouring to help her during
her trial by numerous artifices which are as useless as they are
popular.
When the child has been born, they send for a student from one
of the large general hospitals. In this way the neighbour-nurse
is " covered " should any calamity occur.
These "nurses" have their obsessions and their old-time
beliefs. They assert that—
1. Breast milk and cows' milk will not mix, so that the baby
should be fed on one or the other, and not on both.
2. Cow's milk is never twice alike.