The care of infants : a manual for mothers and nurses / by Sophia Jex-Blake.

  • Sophia Jex-Blake
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The care of infants : a manual for mothers and nurses / by Sophia Jex-Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    70/136 (page 50)
    LaLy so tightly as to prevent it altogether from moving its limbs, their development would be indefinitely retarded, even if permanent disease were not induced. Nature intends a baby to pass a large part of its time in sleep, but when awake she intends its activity in a quiet way to be almost incessant, and it is our business to see that none of our arrangements in the way of clothing or otherwise are calculated to balk her design. In the last century it appears that in- fants were in positive danger of their lives from swaddlings carried to the extent of suffocation ; for Dr. Smellie^ records one fatal case, among others, in which the baby was found at the point of death, groaning, with scarce any pulse, the extremities growing cold, and the countenance pale,” and, relief having come too late, it died very shortly. “The nurse in her own excuse told me that she was told the London nurses dressed them so, to give them fine shapes !” It appears also to have been the fashion in old days to consider it necessary to imprison a baby in the nursery for some weeks, if not months, after birth; and as in those good old times venti- lation received less attention than it does now, we have here probably one secret of the extraordinary infantile mortality, which surpassed greatly even that of our own day. We are told, on the auth- ority of M'Culloch’s Statistics of the British 1 Smellie’s A/iVZia/cn/, vol. iii. London, 1764.