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suitable quality and quantity. During the first year of its life a child 
consumes about 500 quarts of milk. There is ample evidence to show 
that the proportion of deaths among infants is greatly reduced when 
they receive the food nature designed for them, namely mother's milk, 
or when, as a substitute therefor, the most exact imitation is provided 
with due care to prevent its infection. There is no doubt that the 
nursing of all infants by healthy mothers would contribute immensely 
to the reduction of the infantile death rate. Observations in many 
parts of the world confirm this conclusion. 
MOTHER'S MILK AND LESSENED INFANTILE MORTALITY. 
Casper in 1825 recorded that a trustworthy traveler, von Schubert, 
says that the high death rate among young children in Norway and 
Northern Sweden in the early part of the last century was very evi- 
dently due to feeding infants with cow's milk instead of mother's 
milk. At present, breast nursing is altogether the custom throughout 
Norway, insomuch that Borchart quoting statistics in 1883 says that 
in Norway and Scotland where suckling of infants is the rule, out 
of 100 children born lOT for Norway and 11.9 for Scotland die, 
whereas in TCiirtemberg, where mothers as a rule are not in the habit 
of suckling their infants, 35T per cent perish in the first year of life. 
W. J. Tyson states that of all infants who die in England in the 
first year of life three-fourths have been fed artificially, and Doctor 
Hope, medical officer of health of Liverpool, says that according to 
his observation sanitary conditions have no marked influence on 
infant mortality, but that the methods of infant feeding are chiefly 
responsible for the high rate at which it is maintained. 
Newsholme. with a view to determining the relation of mortality 
to artificial feeding, gives a census of an infant population of 1.259 in 
10.308 houses in Brighton. England, taken in a house-to-house inspec- 
tion in the three years 1903-5. inclusive, combined with an inquiry 
into the manner of feeding of 121 babes dying of diarrhea and be- 
longing to the same social stratum as those forming the sample popu- 
lation, He concludes from these inquiries that, taking the whole of 
the first year of life, the number of deaths from epidemic diarrhea 
among breast-fed babes is not much more than one-tenth the number 
among artificially fed infants. Considering separately infants aged 
from 6 to 9 months, bearing in mind the fact that breast-fed babes 
at this age must have been breast-fed from birth, he finds that 57 
per cent of such babes were entirely and an additional 17 per cent 
partly breast-fed. Not one of the deaths at the age in question oc- 
curred among breast-fed or partially breast-fed children. 
By a similar inquiry the results obtained at Brighton were con- 
firmed in the borough of Finsbury, England, by an investigation by 
