Essay on cholera infantum / by M.L. Knapp.

  • Knapp, M. L. (Moses L.), 1799-1879
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on cholera infantum / by M.L. Knapp. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    46/96 (page 46)
    cause and essential nature of the Clioleric disease after con- sidering its connection with emigrants ; tlieir contamination with scurvy ; the collapsing law of its manifestation ; and the parallelism between the over-percentage of mortality reported still-born, and the deaths from Cholera Infantum in New York since 1847, when the enormous increase of emi- gration to this country set in? I think not: the matter must be as good as settled in the mind of every candid reader, it appears to me. There is another particular in the histoiy of Cholera In- fantum that must not be passed unnoticed; it is this, that while it is generally confined to infants of the poor, wretched, and ill-fed classes described, it occasionally manifests itself in infants of the better classes, families supposed to be eumptuously fed ; apparently belying the theory of its scor- butic character. Those practitioners who attend the higher classes in cities, even when the disease is raging among infants in the lowest walks of life, see but little of it. But this exception only proves the rule—luxuiy and ejSeminacy are closely associated. Many a mother in high life becomes dyspeptic, scorbutic, and hopelessly dilapidated by luxury, inaction, and rapid breeding, and entails the most faulty stamina upon her offspring, and affords from the breast the most unhealthy nutrition. Neither mother nor infant under Buch circumstances can appropriate the materials of a healthy nutrition, for the want of organic vigor; and besides, the most mistaken prohibitions are often enjoined by medical direction—the acids, fruits and vegetables being interdicted, (of all articles of diet, with good beef and porter or wine bitters added, the most needed) while crackers and tea, toast, soda biscuits, and cocoa are daily inflicted, to the per- petuation of the constitutional difliculty in both mother and child. It thus becomes an heir-loom in families, dr an her- editary taint. Dr. J. Forsythe Meigs, (Diseases of Children, page 202) says : My own observation leads me to believe that the disease is apt to occur in certain families. I am acquainted with one family in this city [Philadelphia] in