MILK SUPPLY : DISCUSSION 211 



doubt that a large proportion of the deaths of children under 

 i year of age was due either to the immaturity and ignorance 

 of their mothers, or to the severe physical labour which 

 Indian women of the poorer class were called upon to per- 

 form. He was glad, however, to be able to state that in 

 India they had not to contend with the difficulty mentioned 

 yesterday in connection with native mothers in Australia. 

 The Indian woman was a model wife and mother, and if she 

 erred in the management or feeding of her child, it was 

 merely through ignorance, and not from want of maternal 

 affection. Another adverse factor vying in importance with 

 that of early marriage in determining the excessive infantile 

 mortality was found in the primitive methods of midwifery 

 almost universally in vogue, and the complete disregard of 

 proper precautions during the puerperium. Such methods 

 not only led directly to the death of the infants from 

 tetanus and various septic infections, but indirectly increased 

 the infant mortality by depriving the children of their 

 natural nourishment. It must be remembered that owing to 

 the unsatisfactory nature of the diet substituted for their 

 mother's milk, the death of the mother or the drying up of 

 her milk practically sealed the fate of the child. Bearing 

 in mind therefore what he had said with regard to the 

 prejudice of the people, and the conditions under which 

 they lived, he felt that in India, whatever they might succeed 

 in accomplishing in the large cities (and they were doing 

 their best), their aim so far as the rural population was 

 concerned which they must remember constituted 90 per 

 cent, of the whole must be not so much the control of the 

 milk supply, but rather the eradication of malaria, the educa- 

 tion of the masses in domestic and personal hygiene, the 

 building up of the physique of the mother so as to fit them 

 for all the duties of maternity, and lastly their protection 

 from the dangers of childbirth. In fact their aim should be 

 to secure for every child born into the world an adequate 

 supply of natural nourishment, and not to substitute for this 

 the milk of an alien animal, for no matter how carefully 

 they might humanize or pasteurize it, they 'could not get 

 away from the fact that Nature intended cow's milk for 

 calves and not for human babies. This might be a counsel 

 of perfection, but, after all, perfection was what they were 

 aiming at, though he feared that many centuries would roll 

 by before they attained to it. 



Dr. HENRY L. COIT (Medical Society of New Jersey, 

 U.S.A.) said that when he consented a few moments ago to 

 speak upon the question of the milk supply he did not expect 

 to be asked to open the discussion. Had he known before- 



