HOME PAGE    HEALTH LIBRARY CATALOG

Front Matter Introduction I Disease--Two Views II The Slaughter of The Innocents III Prenatal Care IV Babies Should be Born in the Spring V Baby's Growth and Development VI The Child's Teeth VII Teething VIII Fat Babies IX Mother's Milk X Should Baby be Weaned XI Three Year Nursing Period XII Cows Milk XIII Pasteurization XIV Three Feedings a Day

XV No Starch for Infants XVI "ReguIar" Crimes in Feeding XVII Feeding of Infants XVIII Baby's General Care XIX Feeding Children from two to six years XX A Healthy Child XXI Undernutrition XXII The Acute "Infectious" Diseases of Childhood XXIII Skin Disorders XXIV Common Disorders of Infants and Children XXV Child Education XXVI Corporal Punishment XVII Vaccinia XXVIII Serum Poisoning XXIX Commercial Medicine

    "Pears and peaches may be given cooked at three or four years. In general it is not advisable to give them uncooked before the child is five years old. #### The pulp of the orange may be given at four years. We do not think that grapefruit should be given to young children."

    They cast doubts on bananas, then say "they are rather more digestible when baked, and, of course, when taken raw, should be scraped or cut into fine pieces"--to train the child to swallow its food without chewing it, I suppose.

    But let us go on: "We do not believe in giving raw apples to children, at any rate, before they are six years old. Raw apples are indigestible for many children, as well as adults, even when they are scraped (But not when they are chewed. H.M.S.) The old saying that 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' has been a great boon for those physicians who specialize in diseases of children." "Uncooked berries should not be given to children before they are six years old. Cooked strawberries and blueberries may, however, be given cautiously after children are four years old. Melons are not a suitable form of food for young children; nor are nuts."

    After expressing all this fear of the best foods in the world for children--fruits, berries, melons, nuts; and these raw--they tell us that the list of desserts may be increased during the third year to include prune whip, simple gelatins, bread and rice puddings, baked custard--plain cookies are added after the fourth birthday, as is, also vanilla ice cream.

    Nor do these complete this catalogue of crimes against the health of the child. For, as a climax, to all of this stupidity, they say: "Whole wheat bread has but very little, if any, more nutritive value than bread made from white flour. ### The same is true of brown and polished rice."

    I write this book for intelligent people, and not for those who foolishly follow such advice as the above. Yet, bad as it is, it is not as bad as the advise many doctors give on infant feeding. I have selected as a prize exhibit in dietetic insanity, the dietary of leaders in the profession, not that of the small-fry. The deplorable results of such feeding speak for themselves. The fallacies in this diet will be made apparent as we proceed.

    

    
CHAPTER XVII
FEEDING OF INFANTS

    We have heard many reputable physicians say that infant feeding is the hardest problem with which they have to deal. This despite the fact that about all the time spent in Medical Colleges, in the study of diet, is devoted to infant feeding.

    Every old grandmother knows all there is to be known about the care and feeding of infants. She may have given birth to ten children and half of these may have succeeded in reaching maturity but this terrible death rate does not convince her that her pet superstitions about infant care are not "law and gospel." The fact is these people usually know about as little about caring for a baby properly as the physician does.

    When we see or even think of the many senseless abuses to which many thousands of babies are forced to submit we do not wonder that the death rate among infants is so terribly high. A great part of these are actually killed--murdered. Many mothers feed their children so much and so often that the baby is in a constant state of discomfort or actual suffering. Every time it cries from this cause it is fed again. One soon comes to believe that babies are incapable of crying except when hungry. As the crying continues some soothing syrup, which invariably contains opium in some form, is given. Very often an alcoholic is administered and in many other ways baby is drugged.

    Then there is a widespread superstition that if a mother allows the baby to "taste" some of each food she eats, her milk will not give baby the colic. We have seen many mothers begin feeding their babies in this way by the time they were a few weeks old and long before they were really capable of properly caring for such foods they were eating, corn, oatmeal, beans, meat, eggs, etc. Such crimes against infants would be tolerated by no stock raiser towards his young animals. He knows only too well that the consequences to the animals would be disastrous.

    Dr. Tilden says: "if we ever get on to a rational plan of eating, children up to two years of age will be fed on an exclusive milk diet, with orange or other fruit or vegetable juices."

    Certain it is that nature did not intend the baby to chew food until its teeth are sufficiently developed to perform this function. Since they reach this stage of development at from twenty to twenty-four months after birth, there seems to be no earlier need for "solid" foods. If earlier need for such foods exist why does nature not supply the needed chewing equipment at an earlier period?

    The natural indications are for an exclusive milk diet for the first two years. We add fruit juices, not because there is any need for them in nature's scheme of things, but because in our unnatural life, we do not supply them with milk of proper quality. Soft fruits may be used before the teeth are fully developed, but only after they are sufficiently developed to enable the child to mash these up well.

    Eminent medical authorities and child specialists write voluminously upon the feeding of infants and they go contrary to all of this; but if their advice is good, why the prevailing frightful infant mortality? Why the terrible amount of sickness and suffering in infants and children? Why the deformity and defects among our children? "By their fruits ye shall know them."

    Investigations made in Boston a few years ago, showed that a breast-fed baby has six times the chance of living through the first year as a bottle-fed baby. Elsewhere I have shown the great percentage of infant deaths from gastro-intestinal disorders.. Less than ten percent of the cases of death from "diarrheal causes" occur in breast-fed babies, while ninety percent of all infantile deaths are in the bottle-fed babies.

    Breast-fed babies have a better start in life. This can be given them by no other means. As a class they are more vigorous and healthy and are more resistent to disease than bottle-fed babies. They develop into better and stronger children.

    If Nature has prepared milk for the young animal, it is quite obvious that milk is its natural diet, during the period in which it is provided. The fact that shows clearly and convincingly the splendid food value of milk is that during the period of most rapid growth, in the lives of mammals, milk is the sole food. So efficient is it as a food that a baby ordinarily will double its weight in 180 days with no other article of food. A calf or colt will double its weight in sixty days and a pig in ten to fifteen days on milk alone. It is equally apparent that the milk of the species to which any young animal belongs is the one best adapted to it. That this is very true in the case of human infants is amply demonstrated by the following facts.

    Statistics complied by the Child Hygiene Association of Philadelphia covering 3,243,958 infants who died during their firsc year of life showed 50 out of every 100 bottle fed died during the first year of life, as compared to but seven deaths during their first year out of every one hundred breast-fed babies.

    This fact caused one eminent woman specialist to write the following: "The first and most important duty of motherhood is the breast-feeding of her baby. Next to the right of every child to be well born comes the right to his best food, his own mother's breast milk. Mother's milk is the only perfect infant food; it cannot be imitated; and anyone who advises a mother differently is guilty of a serious crime against a helpless baby. When a baby is denied his mother's milk and put upon a bottle he loses half his chance to be kept alive, and nine-tenths of his chances to grow up into a normal healthy man or woman."

    Statistics show that only two breast-fed babies contract the so-called contagious diseases where five bottle-fed babies do so, and that where such diseases are contracted the chances for recovery are greatly increased in the breast-fed baby as compared to the chances of the bottle-fed ones. Adenoids and enlarged tonsils are also more common among bottle-fed than among breast fed babies.

    Perhaps I am wrong, but I am inclined to believe that a profession that knows the relation of cows milk to tonsillar and adenoid troubles, and which makes large sums of money out of its ruthless slaughter of these organs, knows what it is doing when it urges great milk consumption by all children and even by adults. They know that the more milk one consumes the more tonsillar and adenoid troubles he is likely to have. There is so much commercialism in the medical profession that I think it it capable of almost anything.

    American and English mothers are fast losing the capacity to nurse their babies. Investigations have shown that only 12 per cent of American babies are entirely breast-fed, while 28 per cent are absolutely bottle-fed and the residue from both breast and bottle but many of these insufficiently from the breast. These young citizens get a bad start in life and the results show up very plainly when the call for men comes, as in the recent war. Less than fifty per cent of the young men of this nation were found physically fit. In New Zealand, where breast feeding is the rule, the infant death rate is only half of that in America. This in slgnitlcant and should lead mothers to a more wholesome mode of living to enable them to suckle their own children.

    Breast feeding is nature's own method and there is none equally as good. No other method can assure your baby the health and strength that breast feeding will. Breast-fed babies have less disease than bottle-fed ones, while ten bottle-fed babies die to one fed on breast milk. Bowel troubles, often fatal to infants in the summer, are comparatively rare in breast-fed infants. Breast milk requires no fixing. It is always ready and never sour. It is free from dirt and all contamination from without. It does not have to be measured and prepared. It does not undergo deterioration like cow's milk. It is given fresh and warm and flows directly from the producer to the consumer, as nature intended.

    Aside from their frequent failure to suckle their young, civilized mothers do better after the baby comes, while savage mothers do better up to the time of birth. After that ignorance and lack of sanitation among savages work for a high mortality.

    If civilized mothers will learn to do as well or better before baby comes as the savage mother does, and learn to suckle her child as well as the savage mothers this, coupled with her tremendous sanitary and hygienic advantages and greater knowledge, will enable her to reduce the infant death rate to but a small per cent of what it now is. It goes without saying that they should learn to care for baby in every way.

    I have little faith, however, in the liklihood of the modern woman ever returning to her primitive vigor and strength. She is not possessed of the desire to do so, nor of the necessary self control to avoid the evils and abuses that have brought about her present condition. Give to a woman a popular cook book and a rational work on diet and she will almost invariably employ the cook book and let the work on diet rust. Teach her the value of exercise and she will ride the cars with her dog. Paint, powder and the dressmaker's art will pass for the appearance of health. Even our atheletic girls, of whom we read and see so much today, are semi-invalids. They have not learned how to live and they will not learn how. Of course, their male acquaintances are not one bit better in these respects. Women can have normal childbirths and supply their children with milk when they learn to live normally. Until then, they will have to depend on artificial foods and that abomination of infant life--calf food.

    The chief cause of digestive disorders in infants and of all those other complaints that grow out of these is overfeeding. The habit of feeding babies every two hours during the day and every time it wakes up and cries at night is a ruinous one. Such feeding over works the baby's digestive organs and introduces an excess of food into the alimentary track to ferment and poison the child. It weakens and sickens the child producing diarrhea, colic, skin eruptions, and more serious disorders.

    Feeding the baby at night prevents both mother and child from sleeping and teaches the child irregularity in sleep. When the mother's sleep is disturbed in this way, she is weakened and normal secretions are interfered with, resulting in an impairment of her milk. The impairment of the milk reacts unfavorably upon the child. Feeding at night is not only unnecessary, it overfeeds and sickens the child.

    This method of feeding, which is also the popular one, is what really makes the problem of infant feeding a difficult one. There is no way to adapt even the most wholesome and easily digested food to an infant when it is fed in such quantities. With proper feeding it is but little trouble to find a food that will "agree" with the baby.

    Real hunger seldom appears for two or three days after birth as is evidenced by the fact that the baby will be satisfied by a water diet. During this period nature does not provide real milk, but a secretion, called colostrum, which probably serves several needs of the child and does not behave merely as a laxative, as it is usually supposed to do.

    We hear of a so-called "inanition fever" that is supposed to develop in rare cases during this period, when it becomes necessary to feed the baby artificially. This is a medical fallacy and need not be considered here.

    Some ignorant and ill-advised nurses and mothers, thinking it necessary to feed the baby during this period, when nature has not supplied food, give it cows milk or sugar in water, or other "food." This is a needless and pernicious practice. The baby need not be put to the breast during the first twenty-four hours after birth.

    Three to four feedings in twenty-four hours is enough for any baby. No feeding should be done at night. Babies fed in this way develop faster than those stuffed in the old way. Over nutrition actually inhibits function and retards growth and development. No feeding should ever be done between meals. Every time a child cries it is not hungry.

    An infant is nourished in proportion to its power to digest and assimilate the food supplied to it, and not in proportion to the quantity of nutrition it may be induced to swallow. Not the large quantity swallowed, but the right quantity perfectly digested and perfectly assimilated can secure best results with infants as well as children and adults.

    In spite of the obviousness of this principle, it is almost an article of faith with many parents, nurses and doctors, a dogma so firmly fixed in their minds that they cannot be persuaded to the contrary, that the infant that is fed most thrives best. If the infant is losing weight it always suggests the need for a larger supply of food while every cry means hunger and must be silenced with more food.

    The cat, dog, cow, hog and, indeed, all other animals, do not permit their young to suck as often nor as long as they desire. The cat will often absent herself from her kittens for as long as six hours, while I have seen dogs deliberately get up from their resting places when their puppies attempted to nurse, and run away from them. On the plane of instinct there is no such folly as the stuff-them-to-kill-them practice, and the animals are more successful than we.

    All around us are healthy-born children who are "starving to death under the eyes of parents who would pay a dollar a drop for food to restore them." Many of these children are surrounded with every requirement for a healthful life except one--namely, "the knowledge on the part of the attendants of the fact that the Creator did not design that a baby's stomach should be treated like a toy balloon!" They are famishing from too much feasting.

    What is the great secret of success in feeding babies? Dr. Tilden well expresses it thus: "FIT CHILDREN TO THE FOOD AND NEVER ATTEMPT TO FIT THE FOOD TO THE CHILDREN." How? Easy! Watch these few simple rules:

    1. Feed the child natural, that is, uncooked, unprocessed, unsterilized, unadulterated, undrugged, foods.

    2. Do not stuff the child. Feed it three moderate meals a day.

    3. Feed simple meals. Do not feed foods that are mixed in such a way as to cause fermentation.

    4. Do not feed between meals, nor at night.

    5. If the child is upset, or feels bad, or is excited or tired, or over heated, or chilled, or in pain or distress, or is sick, DON'T FEED IT. IF THERE IS FEVER, GIVE NO FOOD.

    No other food except milk or milk and fruit juices should be given the child for the first two years of its life. At about eighteen months of age soft fruits may be added to the diet. These should form one or part of one meal a day. If four feedings have been indulged in up to this time one of these should now be stopped

    No starchy foods or cereals should be given under two years. Artificial sweets--candies, cakes, pies, sugar, etc.,--should never be fed to children.

    The child should be taught early to thoroughly masticate all food. This is best done by giving it foods that require chewing when the child first begins to eat solid food. Many mothers feed their children mushes, gruels, and foods that have been put through a sieve (perhaps because the child specialist has ordered it), which may be swallowed without chewing. The result is they never learn to chew. Never give a child mashed food or mush. If the child can't chew its food it is not ready for that kind of food.

    If the child does not relish or desire food it is folly to force or persuade it to eat anyway. Never compel a child to eat. If the child is uncomfortable wait till comfort returns before feeding. Children fed in this way will grow up strong and healthy and miss the so-called children's diseases. Overfeeding, and wrong food combinations are responsible for most of the diseases peculiar to children. A little intelligent attention to proper feeding will avoid all of these.

    Regularity in feeding quickly establishes the stuffing habit. It teaches the infant to eat at certain times as a mere matter of habit, and not because there is a real demand for food. It prevents the development and regulation of natural desire, which, alone, is a reliable guide to frequency in feeding.

    It goes without saying that all food fed to infants and children should be fresh and pure. But we do well to remember that the most wholesome food soon becomes poisonous if taken in excess.

    NURSE your child as long as you can. So long as it is thriving well on your milk this should form its food. If it does not thrive well on this alone, give it an orange juice and grape juice feeding each day, in addition to your own milk. Indeed I believe that with the poor milk supply of modern woman, these juices should be fed even if the child does seem to thrive well. See directions in this chapter.

    Supplement your own milk with cow's milk or goat's milk, If you must, but do not do so, unless this becomes necessary. Let your child nurse as long as possible, even though it gets only a small amount of its food from you. Up to five years, if you can supply it milk, do so.

    Dr. Tilden says: "I am compelled to compromise with most mothers, and permit four feeds a day, and then the majority will sneak in a extra feed at night, which, of course, the baby has to pay for with occasional sick spells."

    Night feeding saps the mother in supplying the abnormal quantity of milk and in depriving her of sleep. It overfeeds the child and causes trouble. Don't do it.

    THE WET NURSE, though now almost obsolete, has saved the lives of many children and deserves to be restored to her former position from which the cow has disloged her. That the best food for an infant is that of its own mother is undoubted by those who are in a position to know. Next to this, is the milk of a healthy, properly fed wet nurse. Indeed, where the mother's milk is defective, that of the other woman will be best for the child.

    Formerly wet nurses were more plentiful than now, because there was more demand for them. Unnatural feeding had not then supplanted the natural method.

    Many babies can be saved if supplied with the milk of a healthy wet nurse, who will be almost certain to die without it. Others that will eventually "pull through," in spite of artificial feeding, will be saved much illness and suffering and the parents will be spored much anxiety if a good wet-nurse is employed.

    The qualifications for a wet-nurse are health and cleanliness. It makes no difference what her race or color or religion, or social status. She imparts none of these to the child through her milk. In the south are many adults who were nursed at the breasts of "old negro mammies," and though we often hear the old mammies say "that boy sure must have some negro in him," it is not so. We do not become cows by drinking cow's milk.

    The Wasserman test is unreliable claptrap and syphilis is a frightful night-mare. Don't worry over this in choosing a wet nurse. See that she has good health and is cleanly. See that she is properly fed.

    It does not hurt a child to be given milk from several women any more than it does to be given milk from several goats or cows. Breast milk, put on ice, will keep as well or better than cow's milk. It is also cleaner and more wholesome. Where a wet-nurse cannot be had, milk taken from more than one woman may be fed the child.

    Hospitals, maternity homes, physicians and nurses can usually supply one with a wet nurse. In some of our larger cities, Boston for instance, there is a directory for wet-nurses. One can usually be found if we seek diligently enough. An ad in the paper will often produce results.

    COW'S MILK, when fed to babies should be diluted. Equal parts of pure, whole, raw milk, and pure, preferably distilled water, should be given to the young child. Absolutely nothing but water is to be added to the milk. If goat's milk, mare's milk or asse's milk is used, these same rules and regulations should apply.

    Milk for babies should be half-and-half,--half water and half milk--up to six months, after which time it may be increased to two thirds milk and one third water.

    Until the child is six months old, milk feedings should be four ounce feedings.

    At six months these may be increased to six ounce feedings.

    At nine months they may be increased to eight ounce feedings.

    They should never be given over eight ounces.

    One is apt to get a more uniform standard of milk where the milk comes from a herd of cows, than if it is taken from only one cow. It does not injure a baby to have its milk come from several cows in this way.

    LIME WATER has been added to the milk of infants for several generations, because the doctors ordered it. The lime is not only of no value to the child, due to its crude form, it is also an irritant as well as a nutritive evil. An excess of lime, even of the organic lime salts, interferes with the mineral balance in the body. This is of particular importance to young babies. Besides these considerations, cow's milk contains three times as much lime as human milk. The giving of lime salts to children produces acidosis.

    We must get the mineral elements that form the body in our foods. The body cannot utilize them in the forms of tinctures of minerals. Drug store iron or phosphorous or lime are not only absolutely valueless, but also harmful. This same fact holds true for common table salt.

    BICARBONATE OF SODA added to the milk of an infant is an unjustifiable stab at the baby's digestion. It increases thc alkalinity of the milk and calls for greater effort in digestion. It overworks and impairs the gastric glands. It also destroys some of the vitamins of the milk.

    MILK with corn starch, or arrow root, or crackers, or rice or barley water, or cereal water of any kind, or farina, or oatmeal, is an abomination. Babies so fed suffer and die from wasting gastrointestinal disorders. These foods set up fermentation, diarrhea, etc.

    SUGAR should never be added to milk. It tends to produce fermentation and all of the resulting evils. A child can be given all the sugar it needs in fruit juices.

    FRUIT SUGAR, or levulose, is predigested and ready for instant absorption and use in the body. It is this predigested sugar that instantly refreshes and revives the greatly fatigued man or woman.

    The best source of sugar for the infant is found in grapes. Take the required amount of fresh, ripe grapes and crush them in a vessel. Squeeze the juice out of these and strain it. Put it into a bottle and give it to the child just like it takes its milk. Do not dilute the grape juice. Small babies may have four ounces of this at a feeding; older babies, that is after six months, eight ounces. Never give bottled grape-juice. Never cook the grape juice.

    When grapes are out of season unsulphured figs or prunes may be used instead. These should be soaked over night in the usual way, then crushed and the juice strained off. This juice should be fed in the bottle and may be given in the same amounts that the grape juice is given.

    These sweet fruit juices should not be given with the milk but should be given three to four hours after the milk feeding.

    ORANGE JUICE is one of the most delicious and attractive foods that can be fed to babies. It contains pre-digested food that is ready for absorption and utilization when taken. This, perhaps, explains why a glass of orange juice is so refreshing to the tired person or to the man who has been on a fast. The sweeter the orange, the more refreshing it is.

    Oranges are rich in lime and other alkaline salts and prevent or overcome acidosis. Ignorant doctors who decry oranges because they "make the blood acid" need to be punished severely.

    The regular eating of orange juice results in the retention of calcium and phosphorous in the body, and in the assimilation of nitrogen (protein), out of all proportion to the amounts of these elements contained in the juice. The juice actually enables the body to utilize the elements better than it could otherwise do.

    Nothing can be more helpful to children, and particularly undernourished children than orange juice not two or three spoonsful a day, but from a glass-full to three glasses full. Don't be stingy with the orange juice; stop kidding yourself and the child with tea-spoons full of the juice.

    Orange juice may be given to infants from birth as may grape-juice. The two weeks old infant should be given juice of one-half an orange, about two ounces, undiluted. By the time the child is three months old it should be taking four ounces at a feeding of undiluted orange juice. At six months it should be taking eight ounces. Never add sugar or other substance to the orange juice.

    Lemon juice, lime juice, tomato juice, grape-fruit juice, melon juice or the juices of other fruits may also be used, but are not always to be had, as is orange juice. Most children will relish grapefruit juice although many of them refuse tomato juice.

    Never give canned or cooked fruit juices to infants and childred. Never add sugar, oil or other substance to them.

    The orange juice feeding should be given three to four hours after the milk feeding.

    Baby's feeding schedule should be as follows:

    6 A. M. Milk.

    10 A. M. grape juice or other sweet fruit juice. (In the south fresh fig juice may be used in season.)

    12 M. milk.

    3 P. M. to 4 P. M. orange juice or tomato juice or grapefruit juice, or other juice.

    6 P. M. Milk.

    If four milk feedings are given these juices should be given not less than thirty minutes before the second milk feeding of the morning and afternoon.

    MILK should be prepared as it is used and not prepared a day's supply at a time. Bottles and nipples should be thoroughly cleansed each time but the usual fuss over these things is ridiculous and born of the fear engendered by the germ theory. All of this boiling and sterilizing of bottles, nipples and vessels belongs to the germ fetich. It is a lot of bothersome foolishness that is possessed of neither rhyme nor reason. Mothers patiently carry out such processes day after day and, then, when their over-fed, overheated, over-excited, over-treated babies develop diarrhea or cholera infantum, they accept the doctor's verdict that the child is suffering because of some want of cleanliness on the part of the mother. She failed to boil the nipple long enough, or something. If these mothers could watch young pigs and see how they scoff at this thing called sterlization they would demand of the doctors intelligent reasons for their babies illnesses.

    "All milk-eating creatures are and should be sucklings," says Dr. Page. Quite right! Milk should never be drank like water. Nature teaches us how milk should be taken. So long as your child is to have milk, up to five or six years, give it to him or her from a bottle and nipple. This will insure through insalivation and prevent the child from gulping it down.

    ARTIFICIAL INFANT FOODS are undesireable. Dr. Robert McCarrison of England, says that the "seeds" of diseases that inevitably kill their victims in middle life are often introduced into the body with the first bottle of cow's milk or artificial baby food--and he is not referring to germs, either. Dr. Page condemned these various artificial foods, advertised as "substitutes for mothers milk" and, although, "many infants manage to subsist on them, and in many cases, thrive on them," he did not consider that such foods are good.

    Dr. Tilden says: "There are many brands of artificial foods on the market, and there are tons of these foods used in this country every year, but so far as being of real benefit is concerned, it is doubtful if they are beneficial when it comes to supplying a need that can't be supplied by something of greater food value.

    "I do not say this from lack of experience, for I have had years of experience. I once believed that most of the better brands were really of great use, but I discover after a thoughtful retrospection that I have gradually and unwittingly abandoned the use of all of these foods, and it has come about not because I love them less, but because I love natural food more, and, of course, secure better results with them."

    Scurvy, rickets, anemia and malnutrition are often the results of the use of artificial foods. Many children seem to thrive on them for a while, may actually appear to do better than children fed on their mother's milk, and then disaster overtakes them. Be not deceived by the advertisements of those who have infants foods for sale. These concerns exist for profit and not for baby's welfare.

    Condensed milk, evaporated milk, dryed milk and other artificial foods are unfit for the baby and no intelligent mother will ever feed these to her child.

    SUMMER FEEDING: Hot weather is accused of having much to do with the fearful slaughter of the human animal-- a distinctly tropical animal and certainly well adapted to a hot climate.

    Blaming hot weather for certain "diseases peculiar to children" and for the deaths in these conditions, is a very misleading way of saying, as Page puts it, that, "the excess of food that can be tolerated under the tonic and antiseptic influence of cold weather, engenders disease during the heated term."

    Hot weather favors decomposition, cold weather retards it. But, on the whole, we are hurt almost, if not quite as much by food excess in the winter as in summer. We are more likely to have bowel diseases in summer, respiratory diseases in winter--this is the chief difference.

    Adults usually instinctively eat less in hot weather than in cool or cold weather. They often miss a meal or two altogether. How often do we hear one say "it is too hot to eat!" We find the adult, also, without any scientific knowledge of dietetics, living largely on green vegetables, fresh fruits, melons, etc. They consume bread, potatoes, meats, cereals, etc., in less liberal quantities. They frequently omit the noon-day meal.

    How many parents exercise as much common sense in feeding their infants and children during the summer? How often do we see the suffering infant crammed with as much milk as during the winter! Then when the baby is made sick--There is diarrhea or fever--we see it dosed and drugged to drive the demon of disease out of its little body.

    

    

CHAPTER XVIII
BABIES GENERAL CARE

    Shortly after a child is born it begins to breathe. This is followed immediately with a lusty cry which means vigorous action of the chest, diaphram and lungs and a full inflation of hitherto unused lungs with air. Shortly after that little cry has hearalded to the world the birth of another living child, the physician, mid-wife or attendant severs the cord through which the child has secured not only its air, but its food and water, as well, during its nine months of intra-uterine life, and its existence as an independent being is fully launched. From this point onward, the needs of the child are more complex and its care is no longer so simple.

    BREATHING: Not all babies breathe immediately after birth. Such cases are due chiefly to the use of anesthetics, to a difficult birth, and to pressure upon the cord. Anesthetics and measures to hasten delivery should not be employed; anesthetics being justifiable only in those cases where surgical interferrence is essential.

    When baby does not begin to breathe promply after birth, gentle spanking, dashing cold water on the face and chest, alternate immersion in hot and cold water, and artificial respiration are resorted to.

    As soon as the cord is severed and properly tied the child should be wrapped in cotton or other soft material and placed where it will be warm and undisturbed. After a few minutes to an hour, depending on the strength of the child, it should be carefully but quickly cleaned. The clean baby needs no other bath than one of plain luke-warm water. No soap should be used, and no oil. Never anoint a child's body in oil.

    Mothers who have had frequent intercourse during pregnancy will give birth to babies covered with a cheese-like substance called vernix caseosa. This substance can best be removed by pledgets of cotton dipped in olive oil. The oil should then be thoroughly removed from the skin.

    As soon as the baby has been cleansed, it should be prepared for bed and permitted to sleep. No food should be given for the first twenty four hours.

    THE EYES: The eyes should be carefully cleansed with warm water and cotton pledgits. It will be well for the father to attend to this himself rather than trust it to an ignorant and careless nurse, for nurses are never trained to properly cleanse the eyes of infants.

    Infection of the eyes in infants is comparatively rare, and in cases where it does occur, proper cleansing after birth will prevent it. It is the medical practice to drop an antiseptic into the eyes, while naturopaths who have embraced the germ delusion use lemon juice. Thorough cleanliness is the thing needed.

    The eyes should be shielded from strong sun light or artificial light and from dust and wind.

    THE MOUTH: There is no need for washing the mouth of a healthy baby; either at birth or subsequently. The mouth is self-cleansing, the saliva is a sterilizing fluid and health prevents the mouth from becoming dirty. It is almost impossible to wash the mouth of a new-born baby without causing some irritation and injuring the delicate membranes and predisposing these to inflammation. Let the mouth alone.

    THE NOSE: What is said of the mouth applies to the nose also.

    THE EARS: The external ear should be washed daily with plain water. Keep out of the internal ear. There is always some wax in the internal ear which should be let entirely alone.

    THE GENITALIA: The genital organs should be kept scrupulously clean. In girls these should be washed during the bath with plain water and absorbent cotton. No soap or antiseptics should be used on these tender parts. Be careful to dry them throughly after each washing.

    In boys the foreskin is almost always tight. There is nothing abnormal about this. Every other day, however, the foreskin should be pulled back and the secretion throughly washed away with plain water. Do not use boric acid ointment or other drugs to smear the parts with, as is usually advised.

    If the foreskin is very tight, so that cleanliness is difficult, it should be stretched each day until this difficulty is overcome. In some cases the prepuse is merely too tight to be retracted. In others It ts so tight that It interfere with urination, being contracted in a few cases until the opening is no larger than a pin head In such cases a sebaceous secretion of the glans penis, called smegma, accumulates under the foreskin, decomposes and causes considerable irritation and even more serious trouble. Dr. Lindlahr declares that "the intolerable itching caused by such irritation not infrequently leads to masturbation."

    Phimosis is the term applied to a tight foreskin and circumcision is the customary remedy. Among the ancient Egyptians and Jews and among the Jews of today, as well, perhaps, as among other people, circumcision was and is practiced as a religious rite.

    Circumcision is a barbarous and criminal procedure, whether done as a religious ceremonial or as a medical measure. It results in severe surgical shock to the delicate nervous system of the child and, where an anesthetic is employed, in depressant effects from this cause also. It not infrequently results in severe inflammaion and much suffering and in a few cases in death. The medical notions that circumcision, like the pruning of a tree, results in better development of the boy and that it also tends to prevent venereal disease are rank nonsense. Jews are not better developed than Irish or French, while the fact that there is as much venereal disease among them as among other tribes is proof that circumcision is a mighty poor substitute for good behavior.

    In phimosis, if daily traction will not overcome it, a probe should be inserted and the part stretched. The foreskin should be drawn over the end of a syringe and warm water forced into the cavity between the glans and foreskin, to cleanse it. It necessary, a doctor may be called to dilate the foreskin with a dilator. It causes a little pain but is soon over. In cases where the foreskin is adhered to the glans, it should be peeled loose.

    THE NAVEL: This is usually an object of much concern, except in the lower animals. It is the custom to wash it with antiseptics and put a "drying powder"--arisol, bismuth subgallate, etc.--on it. A shield is then placed over the parts and the usual "belly-band" tied around the child. All of this monkey-work is pernicious and needless.

    Cleanliness is all the navel requires. Clean it with plain warm water and let it alone. If the navel is discharging and a strap is applied to it, so that the discharge is pent- up, Infection is almost sure to follow.

    THE SKIN: Two things are needed by the skin of a baby--cleanliness and dryness. Anything else is pernicious. A baby's skin is tender and delicate and becomes irritated from slight causes. Soap, powders, oil, dampness, especially in the folds and creases of babies with the fat-bloat, soap-containing diapers, rough clothing, uncleanliness, drugs, etc., irritate the skin.

    Wash the baby in warm water. Use no soap or other unnatural preparation. Keep powders and oils--olive oil, lanolin, etc.--off its skin. Oil only succeeds in occluding the pores of the skin. Massage creams are worse and should not be employed.

    Powders often contain poisonous antiseptics; but are not to be used even where they do not. They are dirt, at best.

    Rough towels, rough cloths, etc., should not be used on a baby's skin.

    CHAFFING: This is due to dirt, a wet skin, sweat or water left in the folds of fat on fat babies, over clothing, tight clothing etc. The usual treatment disregards the causes. Bran baths, powders, medicated and otherwise, sea-salt baths, vinegar, starch and boric-acid powder, etc., are the foolish procedures of the "do something" schools.

    If a child is washed in plain water, throughly dried after each bath, not allowed to acquire the fat-bloat and is not over clothed, its skin will not chafe. If it has been allowed to chafe there is nothing better for it than to expose the baby's body to the air.

    THE SCALP: This should be washed every day with plain water.

    "Cradle Cap" is a scaly condition of the scalp seen in some babies. Medical treatment consists of shampoos, olive oil soaks, applications of boric acid salve, and scraping the scalp with a fine comb.

    All that is required is cleanliness and sun and air. Keep drug, and soaps and oils off baby's head.

    SWADLING BANDS: As soon as baby is born it has to be propped up and girded with hoops and bands to prevent it from falling to pieces. Accordingly, a band is pinned snugly about its abdomen and it must wear the thing for several days--to prevent rupture--after birth. Pregnancy and parturition are also such unnatural conditions that nature is unable to meet such emergencies, so the mother must be tightly bound around the waist as soon as the baby is born to keep her from falling apart.

    Injurious belly-bands about an infants abdomen, often pinned as tightly as a woman's corset, diapers pinned so smugly about the waist and drawn so tight between the legs as to produce discomfort and pain, make life very unpleasant for many infants. There is not the slightest reason why the abominable bands should be worn by either mother or child.

    Medical works advocate the wearing of abdominal bands "as long as it is possible to buy them large enough (ten years), the reason for this being that it is important to protect the bowels from sudden changes in temperature or chilling even in older children."

    Why not also in adults? Surely bands can be made that are largely enough for the biggest of us. The fact is that this band business belongs to the sick habit and the doctoring game and is injurious bunk. There is no reason for these bands. These sudden changes of temperature are quite natural and man can meet them as well as rabbits or deer.

    E. B. Lowry, M. D. says, in Your Baby: "A baby's bands should not be taken off until he has finished teething. Day and night, winter and summer, the baby should have flannel (not outing flannel) about his abdomen. He is far less likely to have summer complaint if he wears bands. After the first few months it is better to get the knitted ones with shoulder straps as these require no pins and there is no danger of them being to tight. For the first few months, the bands, should be fastened snugly (not tight) so as to prevent rupture of the umbilicus."

    No sensible, well informed parent will ever follow such insane advice. Keep these bands off of the baby from the first day of its life. Summer complaint, due to overfeeding, will not be prevented by such hoodooism.

    When I read through a medical work on obstetrics, the strongest impression that comes to me is that it is almost impossible for a woman to give birth to a baby. When I read through a medical work on the care of babies ,I get the impression that it is almost impossible for a baby to live. It seems that nature cannot take care of our babies as she did those of the "cave man" or as she does those of the lion or eagle. If we are not carefully held together with artificial bands we will rupture! Instead of compelling prospective doctors to spend three years in pre-medical training before they can enter medical college, why not compel them to spend two years on a ranch?

    Ridges and red lines on the abdomen, made there by these strips of flannel, are seen on the abdomen of babies whose mothers have put them on tight as the belly-band of a saddle. Many a fretful, wakeful and crying baby has been doped and purged for colic whose suffering was the result of these tight bands. There is no earthly need for these bands to start with; there is still less need for them being drawn as tight as the corsets of our mother's girlhood days.

    Dr. Oswald said: "Indian babies never cry; they are neither swaddled nor cradled, but crawl around freely, and sleep in the dry grass or on the fur covered floor of the wigwam. Continued rocking would make the toughest sailor sea-sick. Tight swaddling is downright torture; it would try the patience of a Stoic to keep all his limbs in a constrained position for such a length of time; a young ape subjected to the same treatment would scream from morning till night."

    WARMTH: Infants and young children must be kept warm and not allowed to chill. They must not be over clothed or too heavily covered, but they must be kept comfortably. warm. I believe in the good old-fashioned natural method of cuddling an infant to warm it

    BATHING: Daily bathing, or as often as needed, is necessary to cleanliness. Luke warm water should be employed. No soap should be used. The warm bath may be followed by a cool (not cold) splash. Then the child should be thoroughly dried. By all means do not soak all the vitality out of your child as many mothers do. The quicker a child is thoroughly cleansed and dried, the better for its health and strength.

    A daily air bath should be given the infant and child and a sun bath every day the sun shines.

    CLOTHING: Baby's clothing should be made of silk, soft cotton, or linen. Wool should not be worn next to the skin.

    Clothing should be loose and simple and no more should be put upon the child than is necessary for comfort. Do not pamper and coddle the child. The child that is overwrapped, other things being equal, will have more colds than a child that most people would consider underclad.

    In the summer and in warm climates the rule should be: WEAR NO MORE THAN ENOUGH CLOTHES TO KEEP OUT OF JAIL. In the case of infants a diaper will be enough. Let the baby be comfortable and cool. In older children a sun suit in warm weather is the near ideal.

    Hats, bonnets, caps and other head-gear are for Indian chiefs and clowns. Keep them off baby's head. Except when the thermometer is down below freezing, there is no need to cover baby's head when it is taken out. Garters and tight bands are decidedly bad. Shoes should not be worn before the child walks and should be broad of toe with no heels.

    Diapers should be light and loose. They should be washed before using and should never be merely dried, without washing, and then used. Don't pin the diaper so snugly about the baby that all circulation of air about the parts is cut off. This will make the baby hot and uncomfortable.

    DIAPERS, or hip-pins, should be changed as soon as they are wet. The child should be sponged off and dried before another diaper is put on.

    The diaper should then be washed before using again. Skin derangements are often caused by using diapers after they have been wet and dried without being washed. Keep the skin clean and there will be no chafing, excoriations, scalding or skin irritations. These are caused by a lack of cleanliness--they are prevented and cured by cleanliness.

    I quote the following from Dr. Tilden: "It is not necessary for a child to have any malodors. Perfume is absurd; it neither covers the odor coming from lack of cleanliness, nor causes the child to be clean. There is no odor so splendid as the real sweetness of cleanliness. Perfume, like the doctor's antiseptic, is made to hide, or antidote, filth. Neither is needed when proper cleanliness is maintained; and both should be recognized as advertising lack of cleanliness."

    DRESS: The summer, night dress should be a short, thin cotton or linen gown, or nothing but a diaper. Comfort at night means sound restful sleep. An overdressed and, therefore, overheated child is restless and does not sleep well.

    In winter the gown may be of heavier material and long enough to cover the feet. Over clothing and too much covering at night cause much suffering in infants and children. Dr. Page aptly remarked, overcareful parents often force their children to undergo such an amount of clothing and "tucking up" in bed, as literally to constitute the "dry pack," "a sweating process which is tolerable only for short intervals, being very depleting when long continued."

    In homes heated by hot air, hot water or steam, where a summer temperature is maintained at all times, children should be dressed in winter as in summer. They will require more clothing in homes heated by stove or fireplace.

    Dr. Page says: "Babies are often tortured by too many and too tight-fitting garments, through the ignorance or carelessness of their attendants, or simply to gratify a mother's silly pride, and are treated in all respects, in many cases, more like a doll in the hands of a make-believe mother, than like a sensitive little human being entitled to every possible comfort, in the free use of the developing body, limbs, muscles, and organs."

    BOWELS: The stools of a newborn are dark-green for two or three days after which they become brown. The stools resemble melted tar. There is, then, a gradual change from brown to yellow; by the end of the first week the stools should be a golden yellow. The foolish practice of some, of giving laxatives to babies to rid their bowels of this dark feces is pernicious in the extreme. For your child's sake break yourself of this doctoring habit. Let the baby's bowels alone and let them take care of their own function. Don't begin to build chronic constipation in the child from the day of birth.

    WATER: Most authors urge frequent water drinking upon infants. Just now excessive water drinking is a fad and is heralded as almost a panacea. It is quite natural that baby must also become a victim of this senseless fad.

    My two boys did not get water to drink until they were each a year old and at this writing the little girl (age 6 months) has not had water. Children on milk and fruit juices are on a diet that is almost all water and have no real need for a lot of chlorinated, iodized and mineralized water.

    SLEEP: At birth the normal infant sleeps approximately 20 hours out of each twenty-four, during the first month. As it grows older the amount of sleeping it does grows somewhat less. From one month to six months the normal infant averages about sixteen hours sleep a day; from six months to a year, about 15 hours; from a year to two years, about 14 hours; from two years to five years, eleven to fourteen hours.

    The healthy infant sleeps more and sounder than the sick one. The more a baby sleeps the more it grows. Overfed infants do not sleep as well as properly fed ones. The acutely ill child that is fed hardly sleeps at all. It is fitful restless and irritable and cries most of the time. The acutely ill child that is not fed, or that is given fruit juices only, sleeps most of the time. It is less irritable and not so restless.

    Sleep in infants and children should be encouraged. The sleeping infant should not be waked at meal time to feed it. Doctors and nurses make an awful lot of unnecessary fuss about regularity in feeding. This regularity is unnatural and unnecessary. Nature knows nothing of regularly in eating. Irregularity might almost be said to be the rule. If then, baby sleeps for an hour or more past feeding time it is well and good. If the child sleeps so long that a meal is missed entirely it is well. Never wake a child to feed it.

    As children grow older they should be allowed to sleep for as long as nature demands immediately after their noon meal each day. There is benefit and not injury in going to bed and to sleep immediately after eating. Children who do not secure this afternoon "nap" grow tired and cross and are prone to cry and fuss a great deal. Their health and growth suffer from this lack of sleep. The more they sleep, the better for them, and this afternoon nap will be good if they keep it up until they are a hundred or more years old.

    A healthy child will sleep through the night if not disturbed. A child that is not over fed will not pass urine and feces, at frequent intervals during the night. Overfeeding, overclothing, overheating, chilliness' soiled diapers, pain, discomfort from any cause --a loose safety pin, wrinkles in its clothes, etc.--will cause a child to wake. Physical comfort is the greatest hypnotic (sleep producer) a child can have.

    Keep the child always in a well ventilated room. Last winter I went into a home where a young infant was kept in a gas-heated room with the windows always down. The infant was never well and did not sleep well. I advised that the child be kept in an unheated, but well ventilated room. This advice was followed with happy results. Better sleep and improved health followed immediately. Infants cannot breathe without air. Give them plenty of it. Keep them out doors winter and summer. It is good for them. The baby's face should never be covered or "tucked in," but should remain fully exposed while in its crib or carriage.

    TEETH: After advising regular brushing of the teeth of young children, Morse-Wyman-Hill say: "Every child should be taken to the dentist as soon as it is three years old, or earlier, if necessary, and thereafter every six months." What for? "In order that the teeth may be examined and any cavities which may have developed filled while they are still small." In plain English, these authorities do not expect the advice they give to mothers for the care of the teeth of infants to insure and preserve good teeth. They say in effect: Take our advice and then go to the dentist to "remedy" the results of following such advice Filling a cavity does not correct or remove the causes that have produced the cavity and, therefore, does not prevent the cavity from becoming larger and the filling falling out. We reject the ideal of frequent examinations of the teeth, with early discovery and early filling of cavities. We insist on preserving the teeth whole. To this end, never permit the brushing of a child's tooth before the child is fifteen years old, and not even after this age, if you value the teeth and gums of your child. Scrubbing away the gums and teeth of a child is a poor means of preserving its teeth. Such a program results in pyorrhea in many children around the age of thirteen.

    Health and a proper diet will produce and preserve good teeth. Without these there can be no good teeth.

    The present tooth brushing insanity was organized some years ago by a company which manufactured and sold tooth brushes, tooth pastes, toilet articles, etc. They conceived of a plan to increase their profits by inducing everyone to brush their teeth several times a day. Part of this plan consisted in getting dentists into the schools of the land to examine the teeth and recommended the tooth paste of this particular company. At first the scheme failed, but after enough newspaper publicity and lengthy "discussions" the Schools Boards consented to let the dentists go to work. The ultimate success of the scheme was greater than any member of the manufacturing company had ever dreamed of, even in his wildest moments. Today the dentists are not only in the schools, they are being paid out of public funds, for the work of drumming up trade for dentists and tooth bush manufacturers. "Credits" are given to those children who posses and vigorously use tooth brushes, while the tooth-brush drill is a regular feature in many schools.

    At the present time no one dares question the value of this silly practice. Everyone advises and endorses the tooth brush and the soaps that are used on the teeth. It is rank heresy to dispute their value. I dispute it nevertheless.

    THE EYEBROWS: In her Better Babies, Anna Steese Richardson says: You child has a right to all the beauty with which you can endow it. If your baby has thin eyebrows and lashes, try to encourage their growth. It can be done. Feed the eyebrows with a little cocoa butter, or vaseline. If you are very careful you can even touch the lashes with a tiny camel's-hair brush dipped in melted vaseline. I know a man and wife whose looks were marred by scanty lashes and colorless brows. When their babies came the woman determined to do something to improve the unfortunate inheritance. She rubbed vaseline into the brows, had the lashes cut twice before the babies were three months old, asking the family physician, an excellent surgeon, to do this for her, and she touched the roots of the lashes with melted vaseline. Her children, now in their teens, have beautiful brows and lashes."

    This is misleading bunk. The hair cannot be fed from without. Even if it could be, oil is not hair food and does not stimulate hair growth. Still less is vaseline, an inorganic grease, made from petroleum, of value. Cutting the hair will not make it thicker or put hair where there is none. Cocoa-butter, olive oil, vaseline, hair tonics, etc., are without the least value. They all belong to the doctoring habit--directly descended from voodooism.

    HANDLING: Most babies are handled too much. The young of no other species can withstand so much handling and survive. Kittens, puppies, goslings, calves, birds, indeed all young animals, soon languish and die if handled very much. Man, including infant man, can live through more abuse, of all kinds, than any other animal on earth. Nevertheless millions of infants are injured in health and many of them killed by being subjected to too much handling. The following words of Dr. Trall are to the point:

    "Never mistake infants for toys or playthings. Never employ them to amuse yourself or entertain company. Never exhibit them for the purpose of reflecting inherited charm and qualities of which the parents are proud--perhaps justly."

    EXERCICE: Trall declared that "the business of infants is to grow," and that to grow normally they must have exercise. The exercise of infants and children is self-regulating, if they are given an oportunity to express themselves, physically. The best exercise for infants, said Trall, is letaloneativeness. Place them on a smooth surface, do not bind and cramp them, throw off their clothes and let them exercise in a natural manner. Elastic baby jumpers and other such contrivances are not commendable.

    The best excercise in the world for the baby is to place it face down on the bed or palate and let it work. This is Dr. Page's method. Lying on its back, its back and neck muscles are never exercised, while they are overheated. The back, neck, arm, and legs get the best of exercise when the baby is face down. It develops a strong neck and back and sturdy arms and legs. Place them on their faces from the day of birth. They will be better babies for it.

    ROCKING: Babies should never be rocked. The old habit of rocking babies to sleep is particularly pernicious.

    

    
CHAPTER XIX
FEEDING CHILDREN FROM TWO TO SIX YEARS

    Infants and children are not addicted to the many weakening and enervating practices so common among adults. For instance we cannot accuse any infant of bringing on enervation and toxemia by the tobacco habit or by sexual excesses or over work or jealously, etc. Babies are subjected to many adverse influences, but probably the worst of these is over feeding, or improper food.

    A friend writes from New York that her little child was very sick, but had recovered. She adds: "she was gaining in weight so nicely. Looked fine, and everybody remarked how lovely she looked, and how pretty she was getting and then she had to get sick and lose weight again."

    Acute illness as a means of casting off excess lard, is nature's preferred method. Nature really doesn't admire a fat baby, as misguided parents do.

    The lady then tells of her boy, age about eight, that he "was having a terrible time with his teeth--had cavities that sure gave him trouble. I started him off with a dentist--already had two extractions and one tooth filled; will have two more extracted soon."

    She then adds that she also had to have dental work done. She is on the sunny side of thirty and had $63 worth of dental work done at one time. She adds: "I haven't been feeling well for a long time. I don't know what the trouble is. Almost every day I have a headache--don't feel like myself at all. I am afraid to go to a doctor because it generally ends wilt an operation (of which she has had several), or something just as bad.

    Her husband is also troubled in various ways. The whole family from the baby to the oldest member is sick and ailing Why? The medical profession answers, "germs." I say, and I know how they live, it is a very faulty mode of living particularly a faulty diet.

    Children are frequently made into a veritable dumping ground for all the various patented foods, emulsions, and even drugs that clever advertisers offer to the public and to physicians.

    They are victims of the fallacy that they require lots of fats and sugars and starches, which has evolved the present one-sided and deficient diet. This diet is virtually robbed of mineral salts and vitamins and then doctors and parents add a few teaspoonsful of tomato juice, or orange juice and nauseous cod-liver oil to this diet, to make up for its deficiencies. Cod-liver oil and other fatty emulsions added to a diet already over-burdened with fat only helps to make the child sick.

    "Infants are kept in arms, rocked, tossed, trotted, and stuffed with food, in a vain effort to keep them quiet," when they are suffering from surfeit, and the older child is fed in season and out on a diet that is more in the nature of a poison than of food.

    Everywhere one goes he sees children eating cookies, candies, crackers, ice cream and other worthless things. "With hands full of cookies and pockets full of peanuts" they gorge and stuff, filling their little bodies full of these acid-forming foods and robbing their tissues of their precious alkaline elements.

    I recently saw a little child pick up a luscious ripe cherry in. a fruit store and start to eat it. Her mother immediately said "Don't put that in your mouth; it is not good for you. I will give you a cake when we get outside, but don't eat that."

    Such lamentable ignorance! Most people deserve to lose their children. My sympathies are for the children. Any parent can have the truth about the proper care of children who will seek to acquire it. Most of them are too brain-lazy and indifferent. It is so much easier to follow traditions and customs.

    If this mother desired to teach her child not to take fruit from the stores, she certainly went at it the wrong way. The idea that she conveyed to the child was not, that it should not take the fruit, because it should never take that which belongs to another; but that she should not eat the fruit, because it was not good for her--would make her sick.

    Parents often feel sorry for their children when they see them deprived of certain foods, but they are wasting their sympathies. Such sympathies are tantamount to wishing for them a continuance of disease. "When parents are intelligent enough to know their duty to their children," says Dr. Tilden, "they will not feel sorry for them because they are not eating in a way to make them sick."

    Too many parents are ruled by their emotions and sentiment and not by knowledge and reason. Give your child. those foods that are good for it and do not cultivate in him an appetite for harmful foods.

    Beginning with the second year fruits and vegetables may be added to the child's diet. Any fruit in season, if well ripened, may be fed. There is no reason to fear fruit of any kind; peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, figs, apples, pears, grapes, berries, bananas, and so on through the whole list. Give the child the pulp and all--not merely the juice.

    Water melons, cantaloups, honey dew melons and melons of all kinds may be given. All kinds, of nuts, except peanuts, which are not nuts, may be given.

    Any or all fresh vegetables may be given either raw or cooked, preferably raw. Spinach, chard, kale, cabbage, beet tops, turnip tops, asparagus, celery, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, squash, fresh green beans, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, etc., may all be given to the child. Carrots, peas, fresh corn, (not canned corn or peas), beets, parnips, salsify, etc., may also be fed. There is no reason to fear to feed your child vegetables, provided they are fresh and clean and properly prepared. Do not give the child any processed starches, refined sugars, or so-called "breakfast foods." The widespread use of "breakfast foods" is one of the worst of our present day dietary faults. Corn flakes, puffed rice, puffed wheat, bran foods, cream of wheat, cream of barley, wheatena, etc., are not good foods for child or adult. All the great claims made for them are false. For heaven's sake never feed these things to your child. Oatmeal is perhaps the worst of all cereals for child or adult. Cereals are among the most difficult of foods to digest. These certainly do not belong in the diet of infants and young children when the ability to digest starch is so low.

    Give no sugar, salt or soda with anything. The practice of neutralizing the acid of lemons, by adding soda to the lemon juice, is both useless and injurious.

    It is necessary to observe the same rules for combining foods, when feeding these to the child as when feeding them to the adult.

    Do not feed the child cooked fruit.

    Do not feed acid fruits and starchy foods or sweet foods together.

    Do not feed sweet fruits and acid (sour) fruits together.

    Do not feed sugar or starch with protein foods.

    Do not feed sweet foods with stareh foods.

    Feed but one protein at a time.

    Feed no protein food with milk.

    Feed plenty of green vegetables with both starches and proteins.

    Do not feed butter, oil or other fat with protein foods.

    Do not feed between meals.

    Give the child 3 meals a day, including his three nursings which are simply supplemented with these foods.

    If you desire to bring up your child without the need of a doctor, with perfect digestion, freedom from disease, good teeth, a splendid body and alert mind, follow the advice given herein and keep away from sugars, refined starches and all processed foods. If you are fond of adding to the incomes of physicians and also seeing your children suffer and die, follow the "good old fashioned way" that it is the vogue all around you.

    Morse-Wyman-Hill say children "must be made to eat what is given them, ### whether they like it or not, because it is most important for older children and adults to eat a general diet. ### A baby should be made to eat its foods as they are given to it, even if its nose has to be held in order to make it swallow."

    This is criminal advice and if followed, is a sure way of creating in the child an antipathy towards its food or some food and a spirit of antagonism. The spirit of children is not so easly broken and subdued as these authors assert. They resist coercion long after an adult has submitted himself to the yoke and become a slave.

    Children do not have to be forced to eat that which is wholesome and good, if they have been fed properly from the start and have not had their appetites and sense of taste spoiled by sugar, salt, pepper, spices, etc. Too many children have their appetites for plain food spoiled by the vulgar habit of seasoning their foods and cultivating in them the same perversions of the sense of taste and the same abnormal cravings that are seen in adults. Jam or jelly is put on their bread or crackers, sugar is put into their milk, sweet cookies are fed to them often, they are given candy or ice cream or little knicknacks between meals, or they are given sugar out of the sugar bowl. Mayonnaise or other such slop is smeared over their food. Their appetites become so cloyed and their sense of taste so perverted that they no longer enjoy plain food. When they grow older their perverted taste and jaded appetites and overstimulated bodies will demand tobacco, alcohol, and petting; also sex-slush in their movies and novels.

    This varied or general diet idea has been and is being greatly overworked, both as regards children and adults. At no previous period in history did man have the great variety of foods he now has. But he does not need to eat every food that grows just because they are now available.

    There is no indispensible food. If a child does not like spinach, and many of them do not, there are other foods just as good, or better, that he will like. I have seen a baby's nose held to force it to swallow a poisonous drug prescribed by a doctor, and I don't believe in this method of forcing a distasteful food down a child's throat any more than I believe in its use to compel the child to swallow the doctor's dope.

    Never force a child to eat. If he is not hungry let him go without food. His own sense of hunger is a better guide as to when he should eat than all the science of all the ex-spurts in the world, who know all about the thing, and know it all wrong.

    You supply them with plain, wholesome natural foods and no other kind and leave it to their natural instincts to teach them to eat foods that are good for them. Set them a good example--they will follow a good example as readily as they will a bad one.

    I leave been asked whether or not it would be safe to turn children loose and let them eat what and when they will. just as animals do. The answer is yes, provided you supply them with natural foods, do not urge then to over eat and have not previously perverted their sense of taste and cultivated in them the stuffing habit. Don't season and sweeten their foods to stimulate a false appetite and induce them to over eat.

    Children quite naturally eat monotrophic meals. They like to make a meal on one thing. Parents usually do not permit them to do this, being under the variety "spell" and being convinced that we have to have our variety all at one meal . If children were given natural foods they could safely be left to follow out their instinctive monotrophic practices. But to permit a child to make a meal on jam and bread, or on cake, or on cheese, and macaroni, would not be so good.

    A few words may be said about the foods that people have unfounded fears concerning.

    FRUITS are especially valuable for the mineral salts, sugar, organic acids, vitamins and distilled water which they contain.

    APPLES are among the choicest of foods. They are rich in phosphoric acid and are especially valuable for nervous and rickety children. They contain much iron in its most assimilable form.

    STRAWBERRIES are delicious and contain a sweet acid that makes them popular as food. They are rich in food-iron and food lime, excelling all other fruits, except the raspberry and fresh fig, in richness in iron. They are also richer in iron than most vegetables, being excelled as a source of iron only by green peas and fresh lima beans. They are also rich in vitamins.

    Dewberries, blackberries, raspberries, huckelberries, and all other berries are fine for children. They should always be fed raw, never cooked, and never with sugar.

    BANANAS have long been condemned by the medical profession as indigestible. This was declared false by the Hygienists who highly recommended them. "Orthodox" experimenters now declare that the banana, when fully ripe, is easily digested. But the average physician has not found this out. Bananas are very wholesome food and rank high in vitamins. They should only be eaten when thoroughly ripe, and should never be cooked.

    NUTS are also very bad food and very indigestible, if we listen to the antiquated pill-peddlers and serum squirters, who claim to have been commissioned by the Almighty to look after our health. Nuts are not indigestible. They are the best of foods, and if thoroughly masticated, and not eaten at the end of a hearty meal, are easily enough digested.

    RAW STARCH is not indigestible as is generally taught and believed. It is well known that cattle digest raw starch more easily and completely than cooked starch. Milo Hastings has shown the same thing to be true with man. The Department of Agriculture, in Washington, conducted experiments which revealed that raw corn, rice and other starches are digested in amounts up to eight ounces daily. Raw potatoes showed a digestibility of seventy-eight per cent.

    Berg advises "from five to seven times as much vegetables, potatoes and salt-rich fruits (apples and pears are poor in this respect), as of meat, eggs or cereal products--for otherwise an adequate excess of bases cannot be guaranteed," to supply the needs of growing children. With this I concur. The pregnant and nursing mother should make up her diet in the same way, if she wishes to supply her child with adequate bases.

    Now for a few words about some of the old stand-bye that have served long and well the interests of doctors and undertakers.

    MEAT BROTHS have practically no value. They act as stimulants rather than as foods, and all such stimulation is decidedly injurious.

    MEAT should never be fed to a child under six years of age, and better never at all.

    EGGS are divided into yolk and white. The yolk is an alkaline food, the white is an acid-ash food. The white is difficult to digest and poorly assimilated, if at all, and contains poisonous properties that render it dangerous as food. Leave out all eggs.

    PICKLES are indigestible and unfit for food.

    PRESERVED FRUITS are confectionery. Do not consume these abominations with any thought that they represent fruit.

    SUGAR and honey should never be eaten with fruit of any kind. Fermentation is almost sure to result.

    Dr. Wm. H. Hay says: "Without a doubt the greatest curse of the early years of child life is the general impression that sugars are good for children, furnishing many calories of energy, either this or the use of pastries and the two evils are one, for the same objection that holds against the sugars holds equally against the pastries."

    One's heart must grow faint when he sees the children of this country stuffing bon-bons, cakes, crackers, bread and jam, candy, ice-cream, soda-fountain slops, and similar stuff down their throats at all hours of the day. What do parents mean, by giving these things to their children?

    Children soon cultivate a "sweet-tooth" and are not long in learning that they can get what they cry for, if they only cry loud enough and long enough. How many mothers and fathers have the moral courage to listen to a baby's cry? Not many. They are ruled by sentiment and emotion, rather than by knowledge and reason. It is so hard for them to listen to the cry of the baby; they feel so sorry for the poor child. They don't want their baby to cry. It is so hard on their nerves to listen to baby cry. They are just moral cowards and sentimental jelly-fish, who injure their children physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and morally, because they have not disciplined themselves to do what is right. They take the easiest course for the present, little reckoning that they have to pay for it later.

    Baby soon learns that if it will only cry for a few minutes it does not have to eat spinach, but can have cake instead. Mother will give it ice-cream or candy if it only cries for it. What a terrible moral lesson to teach a child!

    The cracker-habit usually follows the sucking habit. Baby discards its nipple and takes up the cracker. If he is taken to church, to the theatre, to the park, to a friend's house or goes to see grandma, he must have his cracker. Mother carries a whole box of crackers,--nice white ones, well salted, or graham crackers, well sweetened--along with her, for baby must have a cracker every few minutes. If he does not get a cracker he is pulling at mother's dress and crying and fretting. The cracker is given him to solace him and keep him quite.

    Poor mother! Poor child! They are both undisciplined and ignorant. Mother is the slave of her badly spoiled child and is as badly spoiled as the child.

    The whole program of living of such children is wrong and ill need of correction from the ground up. Can such mothers be induced to make the needed change? Have they the moral courage to let baby "cry it out" and adjust himself to a better life? I fear not. Their emotions would get the best of them.

    Morse-Wyman-Hill say: "There is no food which causes more disturbances of digestion in childhood than sugar. As money is said to be the root of all evil, so sugar may be said to be the root of all disturbances of digestion in childhood. Further than this, sugar is a very common cause of loss of appetite in children, and destroys their appreciation of proper food. It also, more than any other one thing, is responsible for the decay of children's teeth. Candy, therefore, should never be given to children. It can do them no good and may do them much harm. It is idle, of course, to claim that two or three pieces of candy a day will disturb the average child's digestion or prevent its normal development. Children that have two or three pieces, however, usually want more, and are quite likely to get more. It is true that some kinds of candy are richer and more indigestible than others, but they are all made of sugar, and plain sugar is bad for children. Children should be brought up not to eat sugar on anything. There is no objection to putting a little sugar in the food during its preparation, but no sugar should be put on it when it is served. (This is a case of splitting hairs--sugar is just as harmful when put in the food as when put on it. H. M. S.)

    "It is often said that sugar is a necessary article of diet for children. This belief is fostered by the manufacturers of sugar and of candy. It is, however, not true. Carbohydrates are advisable for children as a source of energy. They are not absolutely necessary, however, as is shown by the fact that Eskimo children grow up without them." (Eskimo children do not grow up without carbohydrates. H. M. S.)

    Sugar, candy, syrup, etc., inhibit gastric secretion and impair digestion. This is true of cakes, pies, etc. It is just as true of brown sugar, maple sugar, and cakes and cookies made of whole-wheat flour and brown sugar or honey, as of white sugar and white flour products.

    Two or three pieces of candy a day may not perceptibly injure children; but when it is added to the cookies, cakes, pies, jams, jellies, white bread, denatured cereals, saturated with white, or even brown sugar, mashed potatoes, pasteurized milk, and other denatured products, it only adds to an already preponderantly acid forming diet and further leeches the child's body of its precious alkaline elements.

    Many candies contain poisonous dye-stuffs, adulterants, flavors, etc., as well as nuts, milk and other things that form, with the sugar, bad combinations.

    ICE-CREAM is an abominable mixture of canned milk, powdered milk, pasteurized milk, gelatin, sugar or syrup, coloring matter, flavoring extracts and often of canned fruits. It is no good for child or adult.

    The following is quoted from The Ice Cream Field, the National Journal of the ice-cream manufacturers, for July, 1928; and is headed, "Baby specialist Favors Ice Cream."

    "Ice cream has been prescribed for infant food for several years by Dr. Luther R. Howell, of Columbus, Ohio, one of America's leading baby specialists. Dr. Howell states that ice cream has proven an ideal food for undernourished babies and in several instances was a means of saving their lives. He says that the homogenization of milk and cream, as carried out in the manufacturing process of ice cream, makes the food particularly digestible, an important factor in infant feeding."

    This is just plain ordinary bunk and known to be false even by the man who made the statement. In McCall's magazine, July, 1926. Dr. E. V. McCollum wrote:

    "There is no more attractive way of serving milk to your family than in good ice cream. We have constantly emphasized the importance of drinking more milk, for the average amount consumed per person is still far too low. The more frequent serving of ice cream at the family table is one of the easiest ways of getting milk into the diet, especially for children who do not like milk and for persons who demand food with marked flavors."

    Men who have been stung by the milk-bug don't care how they get milk into you, so long as they get you to take it. Why do children cease to like milk? If milk is so necessary, why does nature cut off both the supply and the demand? In opposition to this rank nonsense about ice-cream I offer the followng words of Morse-Wyman-Hill, who say:

    "Ice-cream, Ice-cream soda, and other sweet drinks ### are always inadvisable for and usually harmful to children. They are harmful chiefly because of the sugar which they contain, partly because they are too cold, partly because they are too rich, and partly because they are usually taken between meals. Children would be better off without any of them. Ice- cream is probably less harmful than the others. Vanilla ice-cream is not as rich as the other kinds. The majority of people are so willing to take the chance of injuring their children's health in order to give them temporary pleasure that we have found it useless to attempt to cut ice-cream entirely out of the diet of children. We therefore compromise and allow the children to have plain Vanilla ice-cream without any sauce on it once a week."

    It was asserted at a dental meeting a year or so ago that slaughter-house offal and scraps are now bought up and the fat rendered out of these and used in ice-cream instead of the cream of milk--cooked animal tallow, suet and lard now sold to your children in ice cream!, while subsidized ex-spurts lure you on to "eat a plate of ice-cream every day," and tell you that ice-cream is a "health food."

    COD LIVER OIL is not to be regarded as a food. Its use as a medicine covers several centuries but its magic virtues are recent discoveries. For a few years it was a specific for rickets, both preventing and curing the disease. Now it must have the aid of better food and sunlight, or at least lamp light. There is not really much attention given to sunlight.

    Mr. Hater's statement that the giving of "from six to ten drops of cod-liver oil every other day, increasing the proportion as the child becomes older, until at the age of twelve the child is taking" a half a tea-spoonful three times a week "sounds a little like witchcraft," is good. He adds, "It seems only a step from oil from fish livers to the extract of frogs' tongues and newts' gizzards."

    I have never used cod-liver oil, but it has fallen to my lot to care for children to whom it had been given for longer or shorter periods without benefit. I have seen troubles that I am convinced resulted from its use. I advise all parents not to give it to their children.

    YEAST is a commercial product and all the claims made for it are simply designed to sell more yeast and, thereby, increase the profits of the yeast manufacturers, who have no more interest in promoting your health than have coal-mine owners. Subsidized physicians and scientists are quoted by the yeast companies to convince you of its great value. These statements have as much value as those of any other man who says what he is paid to say.

    There is no evidence that yeast preparations or extracts are more effective, more practical or more available sources of vitamins than the common fruits and vegetables of garden and orchard. Indeed, the yeast companies have about completely abandoned this claim and tell us that the value of the yeast lies in other elements it contains. In what other elements, then? They never say.

    Claims for the prophylactic and therapeutic value of yeast are false and misleading. Yeast is a ferment and has been employed as such for ages. It sets up fermentation in the digestive tract and this is certainly not desirable.

    IODIN in water, in salt and in various drug preparations is advised and freely given to prevent goitre in children, a lack of iodin being regarded by medical men as the cause of this condition.

    Now, not only is this theory of the cause of goitre unproven, but we have no reason to believe that drug iodin can be of any use to the body, although we know positively that it can and does produce considerable harm, even death. Its use has actually been responsible for many cases of goitre.

    The amount of iodin found in man's body is a mere trace. It may be a normal element of man's body; it may be a foreign element. But one thing is certain, man's only usable supply of iodin is fruits and vegetables and these supply more iodin than he needs. Asparagus, pineapple, cabbage and green kidney beans will take care of your child's iodin needs without trying to substitute drugs for food. Feed your child don't drug it. Putting iodin in our city water will someday be prohibited by law. The use of iodized salt will also end. Indeed, we will abandon the use of salt entirely.

    

    
CHAPTER XX
A HEALTHY CHILD

    There are certain leading characteristics of a normal, healthy, well-nourished child which every parent should familiarize himself with; for, a lack of such conditions indicates an impairment of health. Such are the following evidences of health:

    Mental alertness, brightness.

    Cheerfulness and a contented disposition.

    Bright, sparkling, wide-open eyes.

    A good appetite.

    Absence of vomiting and regurgitation of food.

    Normal bowel movements, with normal color and consistency. Very little crying.

    A steady gain in weight, from healthy growth and not from the fat-disease.

    Firm elastic flesh with springy muscles.

    Perfect, sound continuous sleep, with eyes and mouth closed. Sound sleep all night.

    Constant growth in height, and intelligence, with an increase in circumference from healthy growth.

    Symmeterical development of muscular and not fatty tissue. A clear skin with a "peaches and cream" complexion.

    An absence of emaciation.

    No evidences of pain or discomfort.

    A normal rate of development as set forth in the Chapter on Baby's Development.

    The signs of impaired health in children are quite numerous. There are various symptoms of disease which are so nearly universal in civilized life that ignorance calls them natural or normal. The universal fat-bloat, and the common habit of spitting are among these. Here is a list of the earlier manifestations of impaired health in infants:

    Mental dullness, stupidity.

    Crossness, fretfulness, irritableness, and discontent.

    Dull, half-closed eyes.

    Pasty or muddy complexion.

    Lack of appetite--indifference to food.

    Vomiting and regurgitation of food.

    Hiccough.

    Flautulence with eructations of gas and with gas from the bowels, with usually a strong odor.

    Constipation.

    Diarrhea--loose watery stools, green or other abnormal color,
with milk curds in the stools. Stools have strong odor.

    Colic.

    Colds in the head," "stuffing up," "snuffles."

    Much fretting and crying.

    A loss of weight, even emaciation.

    Fat-bloat.

    Disturbed sleep. Sleep not sound or continuous. Does not sleep all night.

    Grunting and crying in sleep. Hard to put to sleep at night.

    Restlessness. Hard to take care of.

    Pain and discomfort.

    Congestion (excessive redness) of cheeks.

    Mouth open while sleeping.

    Mouth breathing.

    Slow or arrested growth.

    Lack of symmetry in development.

    Soft, flabby muscles.

    Skin eruptions.

    A too slow, or perhaps too rapid, development, as set forth in the chapter on Baby's Developments.

    Purging, wetting, nose-running and drooling attest to nature's efforts to get rid of the excess, in food salivated infants. "If a child is awake and fretful, apparently demanding food every two hours or oftener," says Dr. Tilden, "that child is sick, and should be dealt with accordingly."

    It is the overfed infant whose inflamed stomach has a never-ceasing craving for food or something to appease the "gnawing" sensation in its stomach. It is such an infant that develops the morbid, dyspeptic appetite, which always demands more food.

    Red cheeks, commonly considered a sign of health, are evidences of plethora and irritation and denote a predisposition to febrile diseases. It is a congestion of the cheeks and is no more a sign of good health than are the flushed cheeks of pneumonia.

    The first signs of approaching troubles in a child are usually fretfulness and irritability. There is often an indifference to food and then, in a short time, a rise in temperature. There is usually a "running nose," also. The child becomes listless and desires to lay down. From this time on, if feeding is continued, the child grows very sick. If drugging and feeding are kept up, what might otherwise have been but a brief and slight indisposition, may easily become a serious disease, even ending in death.