The Mortality of Infants. 80 



But mothers that nurse their own infants have, for 

 one reason and another become very scarce, so that 

 there is not one class of society in which natural 

 nursing- is not on a steady decline, and it is not exclu- 

 sively the aristocrat that shirks this duty or the 

 woman that has to gain her livlihoocl in the factory, 

 but it is just the same with the population in the 

 country. I have lived for nine years near a German 

 village of over two hundred souls, and, on careful in- 

 vestigation, I was unable to hear of one single case 

 during that entire period where a mother had given her 

 infant the breast. The hiring of the services of a 

 wet nurse is beyond the means of most mothers and 

 even those that do resort to this expedient generally 

 find the nurse the terror of the household. 



Boiled milk is generally considered a proper food 

 for infants, and people have thought that to boil milk 

 at home and dilute it with water was all that had to 

 be done to ensure a faultless article of food for the 

 infant. A number of receipes have, in the course of 

 time, been brought forward and tried, such as pepton- 

 izing the cow casein by the admixture of pancreas 

 ferment or the addition of preparations of white of 

 egg, not one of these compounds has, however, been 

 able to receive the support of medical science, and 

 very justly so. Simple, but not always effective, ap- 

 paratus like the Soxhlet have been invented for 

 sterilizing infants' milk at a small cost in every house- 

 hold, yet their utility is, in a great measure, de- 

 pendent on what the quality and condition of the 



