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The Care of Babies: Dissolve
Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water and then add the milk and lime water. Keep in a cool place.
Give the baby 2 ounces every 2 hours during the day and once at night. In all 10 feedings. Add a little more milk to the whole mixture every few days and give the baby a little more in each bottle.
One Month to Three Months.- Milk, 12 ounces; lime water, 1¼ ounces; boiled water, 2½ ounces; milk sugar, 1½ tablespoons.
Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water and then add the milk and lime water. Keep in a cool place. Give the baby 3½ ounces every 2 hours during the day and once at night.
Ten feedings. Add a little more milk to the whole mixture every few days and give the baby a little more in each bottle.
Three Months to Six Months.- Milk, 1 pint; lime water, 2 ounces; boiled water, 1½ pints; milk sugar, 2 tablespoons.
Dissolve the sugar in the boiled water and then add the milk and lime the baby 5 ounces every 24 hours water. Keep in a cool place. Give during the day and once at night.
Eight feedings. Add a little more milk to the whole mixture every few days and give the baby a little more in each bottle.
Six Months to Ten Months.-Milk, 1½ pints; lime water, 2 ounces; tablespoons. boiled water, 1½ pints; milk sugar, 2 Dissolve the sugar in the boiled water and then add the milk and lime water. Keep in a cool place. Give the baby 6 or 7 ounces or about 1 cupful every 3 hours during the day.
THE CARE OF BABIES Seven feedings. Every few days put 1 tablespoon less water and 1 tablespoon more milk into this mixture. Use of Barley Water and Oatmeal Water. Some authorities recommend the use of barley water from birth in place of the plain water used for the dilution of infants' food in the above mixtures, and in the same proportions. But others who have made a special study of feeding infants, think that the use of barley water or oatmeal water is not advisable until after six months of age. The use of barley water has been found, in practice, to enable some young infants to digest the curds of milk who would otherwise have been unable to do so.
But as a rule it is probable that these cereal waters are not required until after the sixth or seventh month. They should not be fed to very young infants except under the direction of a physician.
The late Prof. A. Jacoby of New York, an author of international reputation, stated that if he were restricted to the use of any one food in addition to cow's milk, it would be barley meal or oatmeal water, and that he preferred barley water to oatmeal water for a steady diet because the latter tends to relax the bowels. Hence after the sixth or seventh month use barley water to dilute the baby's food in place of plain water unless you find from experience that it does not agree with your child.
When the infant is constipated, substitute oatmeal water for the barley water. As the barley water is added the amount of sugar should be reduced.
ARTIFICIAL FOODS Condensed Milk for Infants. - Condensed milk is the artificial food most commonly used, especially among the poor, but is not easily digestible especially by very young and frail infants. Its effects are not satisfactory. It contains too much sugar and not enough fat. Babies fed on condensed milk alone are often fat but seldom strong. A fat baby is not always a healthy baby.
Practically every baby raised on condensed milk alone shows signs of rickets or other disease. It may serve a good purpose when traveling or at other times of emergency when pure, fresh milk cannot be secured. Between dirty, impure and stale cow's milk and condensed milk, choose the latter. When traveling or when the milk supply fails, condensed milk may be used to tide the infant over a period of danger, but do not use it any longer than is really necessary.
It should never be used without the addition of fats-fresh cream if possible. Or, if good cream cannot be had, give cod liver oil at the rate of five to twenty drops at each feeding.
If you use condensed milk get the best that can be had. Borden's Eagle Brand is known to be well prepared and reliable.
Manufactured Foods. - Do not be misled by the statements of any manufacturer of condensed milk or other artificial food that his product is a perfect substitute for mother's milk.
All such statements are false. There is no perfect substitute for mother's milk, nor is there any artificial food that is equally as good as pure fresh cow's milk properly modified. The most commonly used foods upon the market may be classed as milk foods, malted foods and farinaceous foods.
These are home-modified cow's milk formulas from the era before commercial infant formula was regulated or nutritionally complete. They are of real historical interest and no practical use: an infant fed on this schedule today would be at risk of serious harm, and no adjustment of the proportions fixes that. If a baby needs feeding other than at the breast, use a commercial infant formula and follow a pediatrician's direction.
- Why this fails: nutritional adequacyDiluted cow's milk plus water and lactose supplies no vitamin D, almost no iron, and the wrong ratio of protein, sodium and potassium for an infant kidney. The deficiency diseases the book itself blames on condensed milk — rickets above all — were also produced by these dilution formulas, which is why modern formula is fortified to a legally specified composition.
- Why this fails: raw and unrefrigerated milkThe milk here is not heated; only the water is boiled, and the mixture is merely "kept in a cool place." A day's supply of milk-and-sugar solution held at cellar temperature is an excellent growth medium for Salmonella, E. coli and other milk-borne organisms, and infants under three months have almost no margin against any of them.
- Lime water is not a flavouring"Lime water" is a saturated solution of calcium hydroxide, strongly alkaline, used here to buffer stomach acid and soften the milk curd. Fourteen ounces of it in a fifty-ounce batch is a substantial alkali load, and the strength of a home-made saturated solution is not something a kitchen can verify.
- Milk sugar"Milk sugar" is lactose, sold by druggists at the time as a fine powder. It is still available, but tablespoon measures of it give no reliable caloric density — the whole system rests on volume guesses rather than on analysis.
- Barley and oatmeal waterCereal waters added to a bottle were used to thicken milk and, as the text says, to help some infants tolerate curds. Current practice does not add cereal to bottles for infants of any age without medical instruction, both for choking and for nutritional reasons.
- "Prof. A. Jacoby"The text almost certainly means Abraham Jacobi, the New York physician generally regarded as the founder of American pediatrics. Whether the opinion attributed to him is reported accurately cannot be checked here; in any case his advice on cereal waters has been superseded by a century of work on infant nutrition.
- The condensed milk passageThe warning against condensed milk as a sole food is sound and was well ahead of much popular practice, but the recommendation to make up the fat deficit with cod liver oil drops at each feeding is not a modern practice and the named brand endorsement is advertising language of the period.
This is "percentage feeding" in its household form, the dominant American approach to artificial infant feeding from roughly the 1890s through the 1920s. Thomas Morgan Rotch in Boston taught that cow's milk was too concentrated in protein and mineral for a young infant and had to be cut with water, sweetened back up with lactose to approximate the sugar of breast milk, and alkalinised with lime water so the curd would form more softly in the stomach; the graduated tables here, stepping the milk up and the water down month by month, are that scheme translated for the ordinary kitchen. Household manuals carried such tables because the alternative for a non-nursing mother was condensed milk or a proprietary "infant food", and infant mortality in the first year was appalling, much of it from milk-borne disease, which is why the pasteurisation and certified-milk campaigns of the same decades belong to the same story. The page is best read as evidence of how urgent and how unsettled the question was: the author cites competing authorities on barley water, warns bluntly that no manufactured food equals fresh milk properly modified, and still gets the underlying nutrition wrong, because the vitamins were not yet known.