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The Care of Babies: Cover
Oatmeal Water. - This is used in the same way as barley water, especially if a laxative effect is desired. To make it, stir two tablespoonfuls of oatmeal with a pinch of salt in a quart of boiling water. Cover and let simmer for two or three hours.
Replace the water as it evaporates so that there will be a quart when done. Strain the same as for barley water and make fresh every day.
Or, for oatmeal or rice water, put three tablespoonfuls of oatmeal (H-O) or rice into a quart of water.
Soak three hours or overnight. Then boil steadily for two hours keeping the quantity up to a quart with more water as needed. Add a pinch of salt and strain as for barley water.
Keep in an ice box or other cool place and make fresh daily.
BOTTLE FEEDING The best plan is to prepare each morning enough food to last for twenty-four hours and place the required quantity for each nursing in a separate nursing bottle. Plug the THE CARE OF BABIES bottles with baked absorbent cotton, cotton wool or antiseptic gauze.
Or, if you do not have enough nursing bottles, prepare enough food for twenty-four hours and place it in a clean, freshly boiled fruit jar with a glass clamp top. Do not use the screw-top jars. They are not so easy to keep clean. Do not use the rubber ring, it is hard to keep clean and is not necessary.
Get together all the necessary utensils, and put them in a saucepan, preferably of agate ware. Cover them with cold or luke-warm water, and bring them slowly to a boil.
Clear off a table top to work on and cover it with a freshly laundered towel or other clean cloth. See that everything that comes in contact with the milk is absolutely clean. Wash your hands with soap and water and scrub them with a stiff brush with especial attention to the finger nails.
The oatmeal water itself is nothing more than a strained oat gruel, but this page prescribes it as an infant food and folds it into a bottle-feeding routine that no longer meets any standard of safety. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific failures.
- Never as infant food or infant drinkOat or rice water carries almost no protein, fat or micronutrients, and giving a bottle of it in place of milk or formula displaces the calories an infant needs. Over-dilute feeds of this kind are also a recognised route to water intoxication and hyponatremia in babies under a year, which can cause seizures. Any question about feeding an infant belongs with a pediatrician and a current feeding guideline, not a household manual of this period.
- The bottle-plugging is the worst of itA milk mixture stoppered with cotton wool or gauze is not sealed, and nothing here specifies a holding temperature, so the twenty-four-hour batch is open to contamination by organisms such as Salmonella and Listeria. Modern practice keeps prepared formula refrigerated in sealed, sterilised bottles and discards it within about two hours at room temperature; it does not rely on a cotton plug or a clamp-top fruit jar.
- Rice water and arsenicInorganic arsenic concentrates in rice, and rice-based drinks are now specifically discouraged for young children. This was unknown when the book was written and is a second, independent reason the rice variant is obsolete.
- "H-O"A brand name, the H-O Company's rolled oats. It signals nothing more than ordinary rolled oatmeal.
- Quantities and vesselsA quart is 32 fl oz, roughly 950 ml. "Agate ware" is speckled enamelled steel, valued then because the enamel was easy to scald clean; a stainless pan is its equivalent. The glass clamp-top jar is a Lightning-style bail jar, and the author's objection to the rubber ring is about cleaning, not sealing.
- If you want oat water for yourselfA thin strained oat drink for an adult is unremarkable food, and versions of it appear in kitchens from Scotland to Latin America. Use a current recipe rather than this one, which is written entirely around the sickroom nursery.
Thin cereal waters, barley water first among them, were the backbone of nineteenth-century invalid and infant cookery: strained, almost colourless liquids thought to be gentle on a weak stomach, with oatmeal singled out for the mild laxative effect this page mentions. They belong to a period before safe commercial formula, before pasteurisation was universal, and before anyone could measure what a baby actually needed, when urban infant mortality was appalling and "summer complaint" killed bottle-fed children in large numbers. The obsessive cleanliness in the second half of the entry, the scalded utensils, the freshly laundered towel, the stiff nail brush, is the honest and useful part of the advice, and reflects the era's dawning grasp of bacteriology; the feeding scheme it serves is the part that medicine has since discarded. That a book of this kind devoted a chapter to babies at all tells you how much of infant care in the period was expected to be improvised at home from oats, barley, a saucepan and a fruit jar.