Various Salts 0.27 0.34 0.58 0.68 0.20
Total 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00
As the mean of eighty-nine analyses of human milk, MM. Vernois and Becquerel obtained the following result: Water, 889.08; solid matters, 110.92. These solid constituents are composed of : sugar, 43.64; caseine and extractive matter, 39.24; butter, 26.66; incombustible salts, 1.38; total 110.92)
But since the proportion of caseine or cheesy matter in larger in this, – while there is less sugar and generally less fatty matter, – than in breast milk, it becomes necessary to alter this in order to adapt it to the stomachs of infants, -especially of those quite recently born. For this purpose should be chosen the milk of a perfectly healthy cow, -one that is fed upon her natural diet of hay or grass, and pure water alone:- a “new milch cow” is best. This milk should be allowed to stand from two to four hours after being drawn from the cow; then the top part only, being the richest in fatty matter, should be dipped off and diluted with an equal part of pure warm water;t he whole to be sweetened with pure white sugar, or sugar of milk, (*Every Homoeopathic physician should furnish to his friends this invaluable article; and persuade them always to employ it in preparing food for infants,- since from being far less likely to become rancid it is found to be immeasurably superior.) till its taste in this respect resembles mother’s milk. By this process the proportion of cheesy matter is diminished, the butter and saccharine qualities increased, and a very excellent imitation of human milk obtained. Care should always be taken to present the infant’s food at the proper temperature; this should be as nearly as possible the same as that of the mother’s milk; and a thermometer will be found very useful in enabling the food to be given always at a uniform and healthy temperature. No less important is it to prepare the food often enough, to secure it from becoming soured in the least; either before or after it is consumed. For rancid milk is even more destructive to these little ones than is putrifying food to adults. And if the sugar of milk be employed to sweeten the infant food, instead of common cane-sugar, it will be very much less capable of becoming sour in the child’s stomach and of thus inducing serious gastric and intestinal irritation.
As the child grows older, the proportion of water may be gradually diminished. As the child becomes till older and the teeth become more developed, some portion of good, well-risen domestic bread may be added to the milk.
By carefully pursuing the course here pointed out, the new-born babe may be fed without fatally deranging its digestive organs before it has acquired any strength of its own by assimilating suitable food; and its food can be made gradually more hearty in order to comply with the increasing demands of its daily growth, – and thus prevent it from becoming atrophied by starvation, or diseased from want of nutriment of the proper kind. For these reasons also it becomes always the first duty of the nursing mother to take care of herself in order that she may maintain her own system in a state suitable for sustaining the young and tender life which is dependent upon her. This indeed unassisted nature teaches in general; our art simply requires that we see to it that such persons live on a plain, nutritious diet, make use of no unsuitable or highly-seasoned food, and in all other respects observe all the hygienic rules which belong to the period of lactation.
Infants at the breast require food sufficient in quantity, as well as to receive it at short intervals. When the milk is secreted very abundantly, as is often the case, the child overloads its stomach, the excess is rejected by vomiting, or rather by regurgitation, with little effort and no distress. But if the flow of milk is scanty, the child worried the breast in vain, and is always unsatisfied. The milk also varies in quality in different women, as well as in quantity, – and in the same mother under different circumstances and conditions. Some slight modification of the healthy standard of the milk can be borne, for a while at least, without any immediate and apparent alteration in the child’s health. but let this change be more strongly marked and the child’s health will begin to fail at once; its life may be exhausted in a few hours by convulsions; or almost instantly destroyed by nervous “shock, as in cases of sudden and violent emotion on the part of the mother. These violent emotions, which sometimes prove so suddenly fatal to the infant at the breast, are evidently conveyed into its delicate system with all their deadly force, through the milk which passes so rapidly into its circulation and poisons its blood.
ANTIPSORIC PROPHYLACTIC TREATMENT. – From the Treatise of Dr. Leadam, we quote the following excellent remarks on the anti- psoric prophylactic treatment of infants: “Dr. Gastier, of Paris, has entered largely into the subject of the prophylactic treatment of children, with the view of preventing the hereditary dyscrasia, which come under the denomination of Psora. He has also declared that the vaccine virus does not usually take effect in those subjects whose constitutions have been acted upon by this treatment, and that they are, a fortiori, unsusceptible of the small-pox. (with the greatest respect for the prophylactic treatment here recommended, we still doubt whether it can be depended upon to do all that Dr. Gastier here claims for it.) This may be open to dispute; but experience alone can decide the question. If observation should confirm it, it will evidence a renovating and conservative power in the Homoeopathic remedies which Hahnemann himself could scarcely have dreamt of.
The plan recommended by those who have paid particular attention to the subject, is to administer to the infant, soon after birth, two globules of a high dynamization of Sulphur200, by placing them on the tongue, – and to repeat this same dose at the end of four or five weeks, if no morbid symptoms demand any other medicine. After this, at about the third months, a similar dose of calcarea is to be given, which has the advantage of facilitating, in a surpassing manner, the development of the teeth. Under this treatment, the infant expands and thrives with a physical and moral energy which indicates health; while the root of much bitterness has been destroyed by the prophylactic treatment above-named. In addition to the recommendation of Sulphur by Dr. Gastier, – or rather in place of it, in certain cases we advise to use a high preparation of the remedy which is the exact Homoeopathic simile to the psoric miasm of the parent, – where any particular indication of this kind can be derived from either parent. And this we think can be done in many instances; Calcarea in some cases, in others Arsenicum, in others Graphites, will be found in affinity with the constitutional of the parent; and a single dose of the very highest preparation of the remedy, given to the young infant, will exert a beneficial influence, in rendering much less violent and dangerous all the subsequent illness to which children and youth are necessarily exposed.
ATROPHY OF INFANTS
The atrophy of infants is the very opposite to their healthy nutrition; and consists in a general marasmus, or wasting away of the entire system. This condition may result either form the unhealthy or unsuitable character of the food with which they are supplied; or from their own inability to assimilate it, on account of some inherent hereditary disease. In reference to each case therefore it is very important to distinguish as to which of these two classes it belongs. In the previous section on nutrition, full directions were given respecting the mother’s and nurse’s milk and their substitutes when the natural sources failed. And in the present section our remarks will principally apply to those cases in which infants become gradually atrophied from actual inability to digest and assimilate the most suitable food that can be provided for them, -whether this be that furnished by their own mothers, by nurses, or in default of both of these, such artificially prepared food as has previously been recommended.
The nature of the difficulty will be best understood by reference to some extreme cases, such as have already been referred to. Infants are sometimes born into the world in a remarkably wrinkled, withered and shriveled condition, – in whom the process of atrophic degeneration, even before their birth, seems already to have become far advanced. Such babe never increase in weight, but rather constantly decrease, – till they die, in the course of from two or three days to as many months. Some, it might perhaps be safely said, all these cases are the victims of a profound, scrofulous, syphilitic, or other malignant dyscrasia, – which so materially affects the organism that the function of the assimilation of food is never developed into activity. These helpless begins pine in wretchedness as long as their meagre bodies can supply the substance for their own support; and then they perish, as many others do even before birth, from congenital lesion of nutrition.
