254: THE POSSIBILITIES OF MATERNAL NURSING 



breast milk, but also to foster studies which should make it even 

 more possible in the future for the willing mother to continue 

 nursing her infant. 



Where then, does the responsibility rest for the ignorance 

 concerning lactation? Aside from the deficiencies in medical 

 education, it rests first with the State, which spends thousands 

 of dollars in experiments to improve the feeding and lactation 

 of cows, but whose scientists, best equipped by their training to 

 give us further light upon human milk, tell us regretfully that 

 there is no appropriation for such purposes. It rests with the 

 managers of hospitals for mothers and infants, in which the 

 material and opportunities for such studies are always present. 

 In many of these institutions the dietary is not selected or regu- 

 lated with any~"special reference to the needs of nursing mothers. 

 Similar methods on a dairy farm would mean financial loss, or 

 possible bankruptcy for the farmers. These women are there 

 primarily to furnish milk to their babies. The diet of a nursing 

 mother is certainly entitled to as much thought as would be 

 bestowed on that of a cow. Many of these women, if properly 

 fed, would be capable of furnishing enough milk to safeguard 

 the life of another infant beside their own. This should be 

 required of them, when possible, since they themselves are re- 

 ceiving the benefit of public or private charity. 



That puny infants suffering from malnutrition may often be 

 saved by such temporary wet nursing is so well recognized as to 

 need no argument. If this be true of infants who have been born 

 at full term, it is even more imperative that feeble infants, born 

 prematurely, should receive breast milk if any reasonable pro- 

 portion of them are to survive. Yet there are many institutions 

 equipped with incubators, which regularly receive such babies, 

 but whose routine reliance upon artificial feeding and the failure 

 to provide wet nurses results in an excessively high mortality. 

 There is an incalculable loss to the community if the methods 

 of our hospitals do not offer object lessons of the most approved 

 ways of caring for the nursing mothers and the infant inmates. 

 The medical graduates who, in constant succession, serve as 

 internes in these hospitals will in the future care for many babies 

 in their private practices. We cannot blame them if they con- 

 tinue to use the only measures with which they have had the 

 opportunity to become familiar during their hospital days. 



The responsibility also rests upon the educator. Popular edu- 

 cation should be approximated to the prospective needs of the 

 scholars. Each rising generation of young women should ac- 

 quire some of the fundamental principles of the care of infants, 

 which eight out of ten of them will certainly require, either for 

 their own children or for those of others. A blind and prudish 



