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page 403
breast; there he will find the medicine he needs, and just what she needs, too,
to dispose of.
The child's mouth and the mother's nipples should be carefully washed before
nursing; thus, much suffering, for both mother and child, will be prevented.
"Give the baby water six times a day," was one of the most important messages
ever sent over the telegraph wires to a young mother.
Ignorance bathes her baby on a full stomach, because she finds it will go
through the ordeal of dressing more quietly; Reason bathes hers two hours after
feeding, knowing that the vital forces needed for digestion should not be drawn
to the surface. Being constructed on the same general plan with its parents, the
same principle that makes it dangerous for a man to go swimming immediately
after eating, makes it equally so to put a baby in its tub after nursing.
Though Ignorance eats her own meals regularly and at stated times, she feeds her
baby at all times and seasons. If the child has colic from over-eating, or the
improper diet of its mother, she tries to allay its suffering with additional
feeding and vigorous trotting; not succeeding, she ends the drama with a
spoonful of Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup; having drugged the sentinel and
silenced his guns, she imagines the citadel safe. Reason feeds her baby
regularly, by the clock, once in two or three hours, and gives the stomach some
chance for rest. She prevents colic by regulating her own diet and habits of
life, knowing that improper articles of food, and ill-nature or outbursts of
passion in the mother, have cost many a baby its life.
Ignorance, having noticed that her baby sleeps longer with its head covered,
uniformily excludes the air. Breathing the same air over a dozen times, it
becomes stupefied with the carbonic-acid gas, is thrown into a profuse
perspiration, and is sure to catch cold on emerging from the fetid atmosphere.
Reason puts her child to sleep, with head uncovered, in a spacious chamber,
bright with sunlight and fresh air; where, after a long nap, she will often find
him (as soon as he is old enough to notice objects) looking at the shadows on
the wall, or studying the anatomical wonders of his own hands and feet, the very
picture of content.
Regular feeding, freedom in dress, plenty of sleep, water, sunlight, and pure
air, will secure to babies that health and happiness that in nature should be
their inheritance.
"Seeing that the atmosphere is forty miles deep, all round the globe," says
Horace Mann, "it is a useless piece of economy to breathe it more than once. If
we were obliged to trundle it in wheel-barrows, in order to fill our homes,
churches, school-houses, railroad-cars, and steamboats, there might be some
excuse for our seeming parsimony. But as it is we are prodigals of health, of
which we have so little; and niggards of air, of which we have so much."--Mrs.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, New York.
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