236 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



water supply, free hospitals, clinics and dispensaries, but that 

 does not reach the heart of the matter. The truth is that nothing can 

 save those babies but intelligent, educated mothers. Fifty-two 

 and one-half per cent, of these deaths were due to digestive diseases. 

 Physicians called them "filth disease." That means in most cases 

 unclean food, improper food, or ignorance in adjusting food to the child's 

 need — ignorance and neglect — and this must be laid at the mother's 

 door. She ought to furnish that babe his natural food. Failing that, 

 she ought to know how to give him an artificial food that would meet his 

 needs and give him a fair chance in life. How many of us could do it? 

 How many of us would take the scientific care necessary to cleanse the 

 l)ottles perfectly, weigh the food accurately, study the baby and know 

 how to adjust his food to meet his requirements. Fortunately many 

 women do, and the result is fine, strong bottle-fed babies. But we need 

 more such women. 



But you say, surely you will not place all this blame on the mother. 

 She has lived between the Scylla and Charybdis of too much work and 

 exhausted nervous energy for years. She w^ould lay down her life at 

 any time for her baby, she has worn herself to a physical and mental 

 wreck in caring for the baby, and yet it died. The seat of the trouble 

 is farther back. The grandmothers and the great-grandmothers must 

 share the blame. Men tell us that we are conservative, and that it is 

 good for the race that we should be conservative. This conservatism has 

 kept us at home, has made us content with the ways that mother and 

 grandmother had. We have not realized that conditions have changed, 

 and so have not accommodated ourselves to our new environment. We 

 have to meet conditions of hygiene, sanitation, bacteriology and sociology 

 that our grandmothers did not dream of, but we have not been prepared 

 to meet these changes. Our lack of preparation has been hard on all 

 the family but it falls hardest on the baby, because he is least able to 

 protect himself. 



For example, the strenuous lives led by many women of today has 

 resulted in inability on the part of the mother to nurse her own baby. 

 That one item decreases the baby's chances for life 50 per cent. Now 

 while our social and industrial conditions have robbed the mother of the 

 power to nourish her own offspring, it has not trained her to be able 

 to prepare a substitute for the milk that she should normally produce, 

 nor has it . furnished as yet, any means by which she can learn how 

 to prepare such a substitute. The ignorance of women on such subjects 

 is tragic. The sight of a clinical thermometer puts the average woman 

 in a nervous chill, when she should recognize it as a never failing friend. 



