HISTORY OF PEDIATRICS 515 



The inability or reluctance of women to nurse their own infants 

 is a grave matter. From a physical, moral, and socio-political point 

 of view there is only one calamity still graver, that is to refuse to 

 have children at all. It undermines the health of women, makes 

 family life a commercial institute or a desert, depopulates the child 

 world, reduces native Americans to a small minority, and leaves 

 the creation of the future America in the hands of twentieth cen- 

 tury foreigners. The human society of the future will have to see 

 to it that no poverty, no cruel labor law, no accident, no luxurious 

 indolence, must interfere with the nursing of infants. I believe in 

 the perfectibility of the physical and moral conditions of the hu- 

 man race. That is why I trust that society will find means to com- 

 pel able-bodied women to nurse their own infants. Infants are the 

 future citizens of the Republic. Let the Republic see that no harm 

 accrue from the incompetence or unwillingness to nurse. Anti- 

 quity did not know of artificial infant-feeding. The first informa- 

 tion of its introduction is dated about 1500. Turks, Arabs, Armen- 

 ians, and Kurds know of no artificial feeding to-day. It takes modern 

 civilization to expose babies to disease and extinction. I know of 

 no political or social question of greater urgency than that of the 

 prevention of the wholesale murder of our infants caused by the 

 withholding of proper nutriment. May nobody, however, feel that 

 all is accomplished when an infant has finally completed his 12 

 months. Society and family owe more than life they owe good 

 health, vital resistance, and security against life-long invalidism. 



But even willing mothers may have no milk. We require a 

 stronger, healthier race, and one that physically is not on the down 

 grade. The nursing question is a social and economic problem like 

 so many others, like the child-bearing question, that confront modern 

 civilization. 



We are building hospitals for the sick of all classes, and insist 

 upon their being superior to the best private residences; asylums 

 for the insane, neuropathies, and drunkards; nurseries and schools 

 for epileptics, cretins, and idiots; refuges for the dying consump- 

 tives; and sanatoria for incipient tuberculosis. We are bent upon 

 curing and upon preventing. Do we not begin at the wrong end? 

 We allow consumptives and epileptics to marry and to propagate 

 their own curse. We have no punishment for the syphilitic and 

 the gonorrheic who ruins a woman's life and impairs the human 

 race. Man, however, should see that his kind must not suffer. One 

 half of us should not be destined to watch, and nurse, and sup- 

 port the other half. Human society and the state have to protect 

 themselves by looking out for a healthy, uncontaminated progeny. 

 Laws are required to accomplish this; such laws as will be hated by 

 the epileptic, the consumptive, the syphilitic, and the vicious. No 



