1 66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



FACTS CONCEKNING MILK 



By A. E. P. ROCKWELL, M.D. 



WORCESTER, MASS. 



THE cow is the foster mother of our civilization. And fortunate 

 are we in being able to secure the services of this humble animal 

 in our endeavors to arrest the most important cause of race suicide. 

 For our greatest menace in this direction resides in the fact that an 

 alarming proportion of infants must be vicariously nourished at some 

 period of their development by the cow. 



Owing, on the one hand, to that sinister development of our in- 

 dustrial system which compels many women to engage in competitive 

 factory labor, and the invasion by women of almost every field of 

 human activity; and, on the other hand, to the unwholesome influences 

 surrounding those immersed in the fatuitous struggle for social 

 supremacy, we find that each year rewards us with a larger percentage 

 of women who are unable to nurse their children. 



One way, then, of registering the progress of civilization is in noting 

 the constantly increasing proportion of infants in the rearing of which 

 artificial feeding plays an important part. 



It may, with some truth, be urged that owing to the educational 

 influence of mothers' clubs and the like, and the entreaties of physi- 

 cians, there is among a certain class of women possibly a greater desire 

 to nurse their little ones; but of what avail is this inclination if their 

 previous condition of servitude to a life not in consonance with this 

 result, renders them physically unable to perform this important func- 

 tion? And it must be noted that this physical unfitness is not neces- 

 sarily due to a failure on the part of the glands to which the duty of 

 supplying lacteal fluid is assigned. 



Many mothers are able to furnish for their children a fluid, but it 

 can scarcely be designated as milk, owing to the fact that the blighting 

 effects of unhappy or unwholesome emotions so common among wage 

 earners, the over-worked housewife and the social aspirant render the 

 milk entirely unfit for food. 



To-day we live under high-pressure conditions, with accompanying 

 wide fluctuations in emotional experiences, developing resultant temper- 

 amental effects notably prejudicial to the manufacture of a wholesome 

 milk in the nursing mother. The chemistry of the emotions plays an 

 important part in the welfare of the child. 



