A few suggestions on consumption / by Robert Hull.

Date:
[1849]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A few suggestions on consumption / by Robert Hull. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    And then coraes the pitiful difficulty : the dislike to employ a wetnurse. Mrs. A. cannot bear that her child should be suckled by a stranger. Lady B. cannot procure a married nurse, and is too con- scientious to employ an unchaste woman. Mrs. C. says, that her friend's child Laura has been brought up on tops and bottoms,'' and you see what a fine child she is ! Probably, vain excuses ; the real reason being a false economy. How many deaths of the sweetest infants have I traced to this wretched hesitation! Then, if the spoon- fed infants survive to childhood, it is a frail or rickety childhood. Lymphatic temperaments; big heads, looking watery; big abdomens, looking obstructed; spindle shanks. Old faces; old frames comparatively. Girls, precise as their maiden aunts ; boys, solemn as chancery judges. Then come the Christmas medical bills; and at last the pulmonary mischief, tubercles, suppura- tions, bits of lungs only to breathe with—death. If there be one indispensable provision to build up a child for longevity, it is human milk, de- voured from a human breast! If people will inquire into the biography, they will learn that, in most cases, the invalid child, scrofulous, rickety, phthisical, hydrocephalous, has been brought up by the spoon. Prasinus has as fine a family, about a dozen.
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