The Slaughter of the Innocents by Mrs. Martha M. Allen

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 20, 1910

The Slaughter of the Innocents

By Mrs. Martha M. Allen

PROF. JOHN PEASE NORTON, of Yale University, in his pamphlet showing the need of a National Department of Health at Washington, makes the prediction that if present mortality rates prevail, six million infants under two years of age will die within the next decade. Last year in Greater New York 15,977 infants less than a year old died from causes largely preventable. Probably four fifths of these were from tenement homes.

Why do these babies die?—Largely because of ignorance on the part of mothers as to how to care for them. The New York City board of health is now teaching that there are ten deaths of bottle-fed babies to one of breast-fed infants. Acute gastro-intestinal diseases carry off twenty-eight per cent of these babies; these diseases result from artificial feeding, and from the giving of food difficult to digest.

Ignorant mothers feed little children exactly as they feed themselves, not knowing that the infantile stomach is incapable of digesting anything but the simplest foods. Convulsions almost always belong with gastric disturbances. Impure milk is responsible for many deaths. Proprietary foods are also responsible for a share of the infant mortality. Not long ago a young mother was lamenting the untimely death of her babe. Questioning elicited the information that the attending physician had advised that the child be fed upon a liquid proprietary “food,” which contains a considerable percentage of alcohol. The young mother had no idea that her little one had been starved to death, and the friend to whom she confided her grief had not the heart to tell her.

Proprietary “foods” were under discussion in the section of pharmacology and therapeutics of the American Medical Association at the 1909 session; and Dr. Abraham Jacobi, of New York, said of them: “I have been writing against baby ‘foods’ for forty years, and I believe some one must write against them for forty years more; and still some physicians will prescribe them. . . . There is only one reason why proprietary ‘foods’ should be given, and that is to enrich men who want to be enriched.” Dr. John Howland, of New York, speaking of the alcoholic “food” preparations, said that if a babe of six months were given enough of one of these foods to nourish it (provided even that the alcohol part were food), it would cost about a dollar a day, and would require the child to take, in twenty-four hours, alcohol equivalent to six ounces of brandy,—enough to terminate his brief life, or to keep him in a continuous state of alcoholic stupor.

Mothers should learn that there is no drug-store food equal to freshly cooked foods, as the freshness is essential to nourishment. Oatmeal or corn-meal gruel, cooked for hours in a double boiler, and then diluted with clean, good milk, is better and safer than any expensive prepared foods sold in drug stores.

Multitudes of babies have died as a result of soothing sirups, administered in ignorance of their alcoholic and morphin contents. Morphin cough sirups and croup sirups have also added their quota to the death list.

Parental alcoholism is a potent cause of infant mortality. In England, it is said that about sixteen hundred infants are killed yearly by overlying by drunken parents. This has recently been made a criminal offense in that country. The drinking of alcohol by parents, especially by the mother, leads to lowered vitality in the children, hence to lowered resistance to disease. Bunge, of Switzerland, has made a special study of the effects of parental drinking upon children. He states that the daughters of drunken fathers are frequently unable to suckle their children, and this inability goes down to the second generation. He says, also, that there is no real substitute for mother’s milk; that mother’s milk contains a substance, lecithin, which enters into the construction of the brain; hence breast-fed children will have better brain power, other things being equal, than babies fed upon cow’s milk or artificial foods.

From fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the blindness in America is said to be due to immoral living. The sins of the husband and father are visited upon the innocent wife and child.

In New York City at present, efforts are being made to teach the poorer mothers how to care for their children’s health. At depots where pure milk is sold, classes are taught by physicians and trained nurses. The need of cleanliness, the harmfulness of overdressing in warm weather (suggested by long red flannel bandages on some Italian babies), the value of breast-feeding, and the danger of feeding with crackers, sugar, tea, and beer, are all clearly set forth.

It would not be out of place to have classes for the instruction of mothers from better homes, whose little ones are allowed, even in the extreme heat of midsummer, to eat all kinds of indigestible food, at as frequent intervals as they wish. Sudden deaths from convulsions might be prevented by knowledge of the danger of acute indigestion in hot weather, and some bright and beautiful lives might be spared to gladden homes now sorrowful because of the vacant high-chair.—Mrs. Martha M. Allen, in address before the Mothers’ Congress at Chautauqua, N. Y.