Volume 2

The Internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous.

  • Charles E. de M. Sajous
Date:
1903-1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The Internal secretions and the principles of medicine / by Charles E. de M. Sajous. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    1004/1138 (page 1744)
    Telling in this connection are the following lines by no less an authority than Jacobi:'- Amongst those who believe in the omnipo- tence of chemical formulae, there prevails the opinion that a baby de- prived of mother's milk may just as readily be brought up on cow's milk; that is easily disproved. In Berlin they found amongst the cows'- milk-fed babies under a year, the mortality was six times as great as amongst breast-fed infants. Our own great cities gave us similar, or slightly smaller, proportions, until the excessive mortality of the very young was somewhat reduced by the care bestowed on the milk intro- duced into both our palaces and tenements. Milk was examined for bacteria, cleanliness and chemical reaction. It was sterilized, pasteur- ized, modified, cooled, but no cow's milk was ever under the laws of Nature changed into human milk, and with better milk than the city of New York ever had, its infant mortality was greater this summer [1904] than it has been in many years. That hundreds of thousands of the newly-born and small infants perish every year on account of the absence of their natural food, is a fact which is known and which should not exist. The statistics of the question point overwhelmingly in the same direction. Emmett Holt found that of 1943 fatal cases of digestive dis- orders, only 3 per cent, had been breast-fed. In a series of 718 fatal cases of infantile diarrhoea in Liverpool, studied by Jones, the propor- tion of breast-fed infants was nearly as low, i.e., 4.2 per cent. He states that in Munich the general mortality among breast-fed infants is 15 per cent., while in artificially-fed infants it is 85 per cent. J. Lewis Smith says that at Lyons, where foundlings (a class of infants, the parents of which are often alcoholics, syphilitics, etc.) are wet-nursed, the mortality is 337 per thousand, whereas at Aix, also a provincial city, where they are fed artificially, it is 80 per cent. In New York it reached nearly 100 per cent, until wet-nurses were provided. Winters states that during the siege of Paris (1870-71), while the general mor- tality was doubled, that of infants was lowered 40 per cent, owing to mothers being driven to suckle their infants! In my own experience, writes Holt, fatal cases of diarrhoeal diseases in nursing infants are extremely rare. The enormous mortality in artificially-fed infants is due to the fact that none of the artificial foods, including cow's milk, even when obtained under the most favorable conditions and accurately adjusted as to proteids, carbohydrates, inorganic salts, etc., to the composition of human milk, supply the infant with bactericidal and antitoxic constituents that breast-milk contains, i.e., the lacteal auto-antitoxin.* This immunizing substance serves not only to prevent infection of the infant's alimentary canal, but it penetrates into its blood to afford protection against infections of all kinds.* Ehrlich showed that milk was rich in antitoxin, though less so than blood, as he subsequently found with Wassermann. As stated by * Author's conclusion. Jacobi: Amer. Medicine, Nov. 5, 1904. Jones: Brit. Med. Jour., Sept. 29, 1894. Winters: Med. Record, Mar. 7, 1903. ''^Ehrlich: Zeit. t. Hyg., Bd. xii, S. 183, 1892. 'n Wassermann: Ihid., B.l. xviii, S. 248, 1894.