DR. F. TRUBY KING'S PAPER 263 



infant life, and the advancement of health they are 

 effecting among all classes, and most convincing of 

 all how they have come to depend on the nurses for 

 keeping even their private cases on the right track 

 between their own visits. 



I submit that caloric estimation is the only safe, 

 simple and effective way of keeping ourselves and the 

 nurses from making grave mistakes from time to time. 

 In the absence of any readily workable check it is 

 amazing to see what erroneous and divergent tables 

 for infant feeding have been published, edition after 

 edition, and year after year, in some of the leading 

 medical and nursing text-books of the world, and 

 copied from book to book. It is still more amazing 

 to check some of the prescriptions for the artificial feed- 

 ing of babies met with in practice. Our experience in 

 this matter is in entire accord with that of Professor 

 O'Meara, of Cornell University ; reckoning of caloric 

 is, as Dr. O'Meara says, the one available means of 

 saving ourselves from makino- " ridiculous deviations " 



c"} O 



from proper standards. Clear-headedness and facility 

 in such fundamental matters are just as necessary for 

 nurses, who have to carry out the preparation and 

 grading of baby foods in practice, and who are daily 

 helping and advising mothers in their own homes, as 

 it is for ourselves. Babies rarely need drugs, but 

 they do need proper quantitative and qualitative 

 food adjustments, and a serious error in such adjust- 

 ments may not merely be as bad as an overdose of 

 poison, but may actually involve poisoning of the 

 baby's system, not merely unsatisfactory growth. 



Routine weighing and charting is done at the 

 hospital twice a week ; and case taking, including 

 percentage composition and caloric value of food con- 

 sumed, is carried out on simple scientific lines by the 

 nurses. The precise amount of food taken daily by 

 each baby is ascertained by providing a " residue 

 bottle" for each cradle, and deducting what it contains 



