The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases

When cows' milk is given, it must be borne in mind that it contains nearly twice as much curd, and about an eighth less sugar, than human milk. It is therefore necessary that it should be given in a diluted state and slightly sweetened. The dilution must vary according to the infant's age; at first the milk may be mixed with an equal quantity of water, but as the child grows older the proportion of water may be reduced to one-third. Mere dilution with water, however, leaves the proportion of curd unaltered, and it is precisely the curd which the infant is unable to digest. Instead, therefore, of diluting the milk simply with water, it is often better to add one part of whey to about two parts of milk, which, according to the child's age, may or may not be previously diluted8.

Attention must be paid to the temperature of the food when given to the infant, which ought to be as nearly as possible the same as that of the mother's milk, namely from 90° to 95° Fahrenheit, and in all cases in which care is needed a thermometer should be employed in order to insure the food being given at the same temperature. Human milk is alkaline, and even if kept for a considerable time it shows little tendency to become sour. The milk of animals when in perfect health likewise presents an alkaline reaction, and that of cows when at grass forms no exception to this rule. Milk even very slightly acid is certain to disagree with an infant; it is therefore always worth while the moment that a hand-fed infant seems ailing to ascertain this point. If alkaline, the milk will deepen the blue colour of litmus paper, which is to be had of any chemist; if acid, it will discharge the colour and turn it red. It is, perhaps, as well to add that, as the oxygen in the atmosphere tends to redden litmus paper, it should not be left exposed to the air, but should always be kept in a glass-stoppered bottle.

The milk of the cow is very liable to alteration from comparatively slight causes, and particularly from changes in the animal's diet; while even in the most favourable circumstances if the animal is shut up in a city and stall-fed, all the solid constituents of its milk suffer a remarkable diminution; while the secretion further has a great tendency to become acid, or to undergo even more serious deterioration. Mere acidity of the milk can be counteracted for the moment by the addition of lime-water, or by stirring up with it a small quantity of prepared chalk, which may be allowed to subside to the bottom of the vessel; or if it should happen, though indeed that is rarely the case in these circumstances, that the child is constipated, carbonate of magnesia may be substituted for the chalk or lime-water. If these simple proceedings are not sufficient to restore the infant's health, it will be wise to seek at once for another source of milk supply, and to place the suspected milk in the hands of the medical officer of health or of the public analyst, in order that it may be submitted to a thorough chemical and microscopical examination.

The difficulty sometimes found in obtaining an unvaryingly good milk supply, as well as practical convenience in many respects, has led to the extensive employment of various forms of condensed milk. They form undoubtedly the best substitute for fresh cows' milk which we possess, and are a great boon especially to the poor in large towns where the milk supply is often scanty, not always fresh, and sometimes of bad quality. I should certainly prefer condensed milk for an infant to milk from cows living in close dirty stables, such as my experience thirty years ago made me familiar with in some parts of London.

Still all the varieties of condensed milk are far inferior in quality to good fresh milk. They contain less butter, less albumen, that is to say less of the main constituents of all animal solids and fluids, and a greater proportion of what are termed the hydro-carbonates, such for instance as sugar; or, to state the same thing differently, the elements which serve for nutrition are in smaller proportion than in fresh milk to those which minister to respiration. They are not only less nutritious, but the large quantity of sugar which they contain not infrequently disagrees with the child, and causes bowel complaint. I do not know how far the so-called unsweetened condensed milk which has of late come into the market is free from this objection; but I have always preferred the Aylesbury condensed milk, which is manufactured with sugar, to the Swiss condensed milk, into which, as I have been given to understand, honey largely enters.

How much food does an infant of a month old require? what intervals should be allowed between each time of feeding? and how should the food be given? are three questions which call for a moment's notice. The attempt has been made to determine the first point by two very distinguished French physicians, who weighed the infants before and after each time of sucking. Their observations, however, were not sufficiently numerous to be decisive, and their results were very conflicting; the one estimating the quantity at two pounds and a quarter avoirdupois, which would be equivalent to nearly a quart, the other at not quite half as much; but the observations of the latter were made on exceptionally weak and sickly infants. Infants no doubt vary, as do grown people, as to the quantity of food they require. I should estimate from my own experience and observation, apart from accurate data, a pint as the minimum needed by an infant a month old; and while Dr. Frankland's estimate of a pint and a half for an infant of five months seems to me very reasonable, I should doubt its sufficing for a child of nine months unless it were supplemented by other food.

The infant during the first month of life takes food every two hours, and even when asleep should not be allowed to pass more than three hours; and this frequent need of food continues until the age of two, sometimes even until three, months. Afterwards, and until six months old, the child does not need to be fed oftener than every three hours during the twelve waking hours, and every four hours during the sleeping time. Later on, five times in the twenty-four hours, namely thrice by day, once the last thing at night, and once again in the early morning, are best for the child's health as well as for the nurse's comfort.

How is an infant not at the breast to be fed? Certainly not with the cup or spoon; a child so fed has no choice in the matter, but must either swallow or choke, and is fed as they fatten turkeys for the market. The infant, on the other hand, sucks the bottle as it would suck its mother's breast; it rests when fatigued, it stops to play, it leaves off when it has had enough, and many a useful inference may be drawn by the observant nurse or mother who watches the infant sucking, and notices if the child sucks feebly, or leaves off panting from want of breath, or stops in the midst, and cries because its mouth is sore or its gums are tender.

But it is not every bottle which an infant should be fed from, and least of all from those so much in vogue now with the long elastic tube, so handy because they keep the baby quiet, who will lie by the hour together with the end in its mouth, sucking, or making as though it sucked, even when the bottle is empty. These bottles, as well as the tubes connected with them, are most difficult to keep clean; and so serious is this evil, that many French physicians not only denounce their use, in which they are perfectly justified, but prefer, to the use of any bottle at all, the feeding the infant with a spoon; and here I think they are mistaken. The old-fashioned flat bottle, with an opening in the middle, and a short end to which the nipple is attached without any tube, the only one known in the time of our grandmothers, continues still the best, and very good. My friend, Mr. Edmund Owen, in a lecture at which I presided at the Health Exhibition in August last year, pointed out very humorously the differences between the old bottle and the new. An infant to be kept in health must not be always sucking, but must be fed at regular intervals. The careful nurse takes the infant on her knee, feeds it from the old-fashioned feeding-bottle, regulating the flow of the milk according as the infant sucks heartily or slowly, withdraws it for a minute or two, and raises the child into a sitting posture if it seems troubled with flatulence, and then after a pause lets it recommence its meal. This occupies her a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes of well-spent time, while the lazy nurse, or the mother who has never given the matter a thought, just puts the tube in the infant's mouth, and either takes no further trouble or occupies herself with something else. And yet, obvious though this is, how constantly one sees infants taken about in the perambulator with the feeding-bottle wrapped up and laid by its side, because it is said the child always cries when it is not sucking, and the intelligence and the common sense are wanting, as well as the patient love, that would strive to make out which it is of many possible causes that makes the infant cry. One more observation with reference to bottle-feeding may not be out of place. It is this: that no food be left in the bottle after the child has had its meal, but that it should be emptied, washed out with a little warm water and soda, and it and the india-rubber end should be kept in water till again needed. To insure the most perfect cleanliness it is always well to have two bottles in use, and to employ them alternately.

How strictly soever an infant may be kept at the breast, or however exactly the precautions on which I have insisted are observed, sickness, constipation, or diarrhœa may occur, causing much anxiety to the parents, and giving much trouble to the doctor.

It sometimes happens, without its being possible to assign for it any sufficient reason, that the mother's milk disagrees with her infant, or entirely fails to nourish it, so that, much against her will, she is compelled to give up suckling it. In some instances this is due to errors in diet, to the neglect of those rules the observance of which is essential to health, as proper exercise for instance; and then the secretion is usually deficient in quantity as well as defective in its composition. In such cases the child often vomits soon after sucking, it suffers from stomach-ache, its motions are very sour, of the consistence of putty, and either green, or become so soon after being passed, instead of presenting the bright yellow colour and semi-fluid consistence of the evacuations of the healthy infant, and sometimes they are also lumpy from the presence of masses of undigested curd. In addition, also, the child is troubled with griping, which makes it cry; its breath is sour, or actually offensive, and the tongue is much whiter than it should be, though it must be remembered that the tongue of the sucking child always has a very slight coating of whitish mucus, and is neither as red nor as perfectly free from all coating as it becomes in the perfectly healthy child of three or four years old.

In these circumstances, the diminution of stimulants, such as the stout of which young women are sometimes mistakenly urged to take a quantity to which they were previously quite unaccustomed, is often followed by an increase of the quantity as well as an improvement in the quality of the milk. It is true that a nursing mother may often find her strength maintained, and her supply of milk increased, by taking a glass of stout at lunch and another at dinner, instead of, but not in addition to, any other stimulant; but mere stimulants will no more enable a woman to suckle her infant better than she otherwise would do, than they would fit a man to undergo great fatigue for days together, or to go through a walking tour in Switzerland. A tumbler of one-third milk and two-thirds good grit gruel taken three times a day will have greater influence in increasing the quantity of milk than any conceivable amount of stimulant.

There is an entirely opposite condition in which the infant does not thrive at the breast, and this for the most part is met with when the mother has already given birth to and suckled several children. In these instances the secretion is sometimes, though not always, abundant, but the infant does not thrive upon it. The babe does not get on, is always hungry after leaving the breast, and cries as though it wanted more; in addition to which it is often purged, either while sucking or within a few minutes afterwards, though the motions, except in being more frequent and more watery than in health, do not by any means constantly show any other change. The mother's history explains the rest. She is constantly languid, suffers from back-ache, feels exhausted each time after the babe has sucked, probably has neuralgia in her face, or abiding headache. In many instances, too, her monthly periods return, though as a rule they do not appear in healthy women while suckling. All these symptoms show that her system is not equal to the duty she has undertaken, and that therefore, for her sake as well as for that of the infant, she must give up the attempt.

One more case there is in which suckling has to be given up, at any rate in part, and that is when the milk is good in kind, but insufficient in quantity for the child as it grows older. This insufficiency of quantity shows itself at different periods after the infant's birth—at two months, three, or four. The child is not otherwise ill than that it is no longer bright, as it was wont to be, it ceases to gain flesh, it sleeps more than it used to do, though when it wakes it is always eager for the breast, and cries when leaving it, and if the experiment is made of giving it some milk and water immediately on leaving it, it takes that greedily. Mothers are loth to believe this failure of their resources, and in the case of some who have firm and well-formed breasts, there is but little change in their appearance to show that what remains may serve for beauty, not for use. But if while the child is sucking, the nipple is taken suddenly from its mouth, instead of innumerable little jets of milk, spirting out from the openings of the milk-ducts, the nipple will be seen to be barely moistened by its languid flow.

In conditions such as these the question of weaning partially or completely inevitably occurs, and where the mother's weakness is the occasion of the failure to nourish the child, half-measures are of no avail, for so long as she does not entirely give up the attempt to do that to which her health is unequal, her own state will grow worse, that of the child will not improve. When errors of diet or inattention to general rules of health incapacitate the mother from the performance of her duty, there may be hope from the adoption of a wiser course; while when the supply simply fails from its inadequacy, much may be hoped for from a wise combination of hand-feeding with nursing at the breast; the mother perhaps suckling the infant by day, but being undisturbed by demands upon her at night.

Last of all, I must refer to cases in which love has been stronger than reason, as indeed it often is, and in which young people with some pronounced hereditary taint of scrofula or consumption marry and have children. In such cases, if the consumptive taint is on the mother's side, it is, I believe, much wiser, in the inability to obtain a good wet-nurse, to bring up the child by hand rather than at the mother's breast. One word, however, applicable in such circumstances, age and long experience entitle me to add, and it is this. It is essential that, in the absence of that guarantee against the too rapid succession of pregnancies which suckling for a reasonable time presents, there should be self-restraint on both sides, lest the inscription on the young wife's grave should be, as I have too often known it, the same as, in despite of poetry and romance, her biographer assigns as the cause of the death of Petrarch's Laura, that she died worn out crebris partubus, by too many babies.

In all of these cases the rules which I have already given with reference to hand-feeding have to be borne in mind: the preference for asses' milk at first, the careful regulation of the amount of curd in the cows' milk afterwards, increased or diminished by the greater or less proportion of whey mixed with it. Sometimes, however much the quantity of curd or casein may be reduced, the child is yet unable to digest it, for it is firm and not easily acted on by the juices of the stomach. It is then best to omit it altogether, and to supply the necessary albumen by white of egg. A very good food in these circumstances is made of—

White of one raw egg,

Quarter of an ounce of sugar of milk,

Three teaspoonfuls of cream,

Half a pint of whey.

In the course of a few weeks, or when the child seems to need stronger nourishment, one part of veal-tea, made with a pound of veal to a pint of water, may be added to one part of whey, with the white of egg and sugar of milk as before, and one part of white decoction, as it was called some two centuries ago in England. It is composed of—

Half an ounce of hartshorn shavings,

Inside of one French roll,

Three pints of water—boiled to two, strained and sweetened.

This forms an extremely useful way of introducing farinaceous food into the infant's diet, and preparing the way for a larger amount of it which by degrees becomes necessary. Of these, one of the most generally useful is Liebig's or Savory and Moore's food for infants, which has the advantage of not constipating as so many other farinaceous foods do. Chapman's Entire Wheat Flour is an extremely good food; and wheat, as you will remember, excels other farinaceous substances in its nutritive properties, but it is not so easy of digestion as Liebig. There is, however, scarcely any kind of farinaceous food, among which Nestlé's must not be forgotten, which may not answer for an infant; provided always that at first it is not given oftener than twice a day, that it is not made too thick, nor given in larger proportion than one-third of the farinaceous food to two-thirds of the whey, milk, or whatever it is mixed with; and besides, whatever the food may be, it should be prepared each time afresh.

This is not the place for going into all details on the subject of feeding infants, or to explain how if wisely managed the child weans itself by degrees from the bottle or the breast—the best way, be it said, of weaning—or how by degrees it comes to its daily midday meal of beef-tea and bread, and then, when the first grinding teeth have been cut, to a small meat meal daily, finely minced or scraped, and so little by little adopts the modes of living of its elders.

But, last of all, there are instances, though not so many as the public imagine, in which the infant, in spite of most judicious management, fails to thrive, and suffers from various disorders of its digestion.

The most unmanageable and the least hopeful of these cases are those in which the infant is the subject of consumptive disease. It is very rare for its symptoms, even in cases of the most marked tendency to consumption on the part of the parents, to show themselves before the age of three months, and I think I may add, that apart from such tendency consumption never appears in infancy or early childhood, except when it follows on some acute illness, such as inflammation of the lungs, or on typhoid, or, as it is commonly called, remittent fever.

Consumption of the bowels, as it is popularly termed, may be said never to occur in early infancy apart from consumptive disease of the lungs, and is then always accompanied by an increase towards evening of the temperature from its natural standard of 98.5° to 100°. Hence the absence of cough and the persistence of a natural temperature may be taken as almost conclusive evidence that there is no consumptive disease of the bowels. Consumptive disease in infancy is invariably attended with glandular enlargement. The glands of the bowels when irritated always communicate their irritation to the glands in the groin and the bend of the thigh, which are felt hard and enlarged, like little peas, under the finger. But further, if there is real disease of the glands of the bowels, other tiny enlarged glands will be felt, like shot, under the skin of the belly, from which in the general progress of emaciation the layer of fat always present in the healthy baby will already have been removed. Besides this, too, the veins running beneath the skin there, invisible in the healthy infant, will be seen meandering like blue lines, and telling the story that more blood than usual flows through them, because the diseased glands inside interfere with its ready passage through its proper channels.

Two cautions, however, have to be borne in mind with reference to both of these indications of disease. The first is, that the glands in the groin may be enlarged from mere irritation, independent of actual disease communicated to them from the glands inside. If, however, you find the glands at the corner of the lower jaw and those on either side of the neck enlarged too, you are then driven to the conclusion that the glands in the groin are enlarged not from mere local irritation, but from general disease, and that consumption is its cause.

Again, the superficial veins of the belly may be enlarged from any cause which interferes with the proper circulation through the vessels inside. Hence they are often enlarged in grown people in dropsy, and hence too in infants and young children from flatulent distension of the bowels. But in this case the other signs of consumption are wanting; the emaciation, the cough, the increase of evening temperature, and the enlargement of the glands, are all absent.

Sometimes we meet with instances where the child does not digest its food, does not thrive, does not gain flesh, never passes healthy evacuations, at length wastes, loses strength, and dies, without having had any of the signs which I have pointed out as indicative of consumptive disease, and in fact without having suffered from it. Now, these cases are connected with imperfect performance of the function of the liver, and sometimes with an imperfection of its structure. Before birth the functions of the liver are not called into action in the same way nor to the same degree as afterwards, and its structure differs in this respect that it contains a larger amount of fat and a smaller proportion of bile-secreting cells than afterwards. It sometimes happens from causes which we do not understand that the liver structure not only does not undergo that higher development which should take place, but that the fat cells increase at the expense of the bile cells. In these circumstances the food is ill-digested and the health is much impaired, and at last wasting takes place to as great a degree as in the case of consumption, only there are no cough, no glandular enlargement, no big superficial veins, no increased temperature, while on a careful examination the doctor will seldom fail to find the rounded edge of the enlarged liver coming lower down than natural. In these cases too there is a disposition to convulsive affections, and to that peculiar form of convulsion called spasmodic croup, concerning which I shall have something to say later on.

In its less serious form this is both a more frequent and a less grave condition than consumption, and its existence explains to a great degree those cases in which young children have failed to be nourished by the milk food which commonly suits their tender age, but have improved on beef-tea, raw meat or its juice, and food entirely destitute of saccharine matter.

In cases where there is reason to apprehend consumptive disease, the skill and resources of the doctor will often be heavily taxed to meet each difficulty as it arises. A good wet-nurse, or, in default of her, asses' milk, with the addition of cream to supply the butter in which the asses' milk is deficient, a couple of teaspoonfuls of raw meat juice in the course of every twenty-four hours, much care in the introduction of farinaceous substances into the diet, and cod-liver oil twice a day, beginning with ten drops and gradually increasing the dose to a teaspoonful, are all that the mother herself can do. When the cod-liver oil is not borne by the stomach, or when—which, however, is not often the case—the child refuses to take it, glycerine may be substituted for it, though it must be owned that it is a very poor and inefficient substitute. The inunction of cod-liver oil is in any case not to be had recourse to; it makes the child unpleasant to itself and loathsome to others, while the power of the skin to absorb oily matters is far too limited to be worth taking into account.