The Health bulletin [serial] - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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20 The Health Bulletin May, 192:
health but good economics for every
mother to avail herself of their
services.
The mother who leaves the oflSce
of the chihlren's doctor or the baby
health station presided over by a
trained nurse, without having learned
to simplify her task, is a serious challenge
directed against the efficiency of
these agencies. Both doctor and nurse
must educate as well as prescribe
must inculcate principles of self help
as well as preach blind, unobscrving
obedience—if they are to prove of the
highest possible value to the community
which they serve.
This article on the simplification of
the innumerable things that go to make
up the minimum standards of satisfactory
care for the first year of the
baby's life, is written with this belief
firmly in mind. The opposite conception,
once boldly stated and still occasionally
subscribed to, that after three
years of specialized study and training
in observation, the professional nurse
shall be nothing but a tool in the
hands of the physician, without whose
express command she must do nothing,
teach nothing, say nothing, think nothing,
is too absurd to take time even
to refute. Such a position is in itself
the negation of the need for the profession
of public health nursing. Unless
a nurse is willing to accept the responsibilities
that go hand in hand with
her position, and fit herself to teach
her clients to think for themselves by
applying the principles taught them by
their physicians, rather than to hamper
them by inculcating a slavish, unreasoning
dependence upon the doctor
for the interpretation of every minor
incident that occurs in the baby's life,
she cannot consider this inspiring and
wonderful development of the field of
nursing for herself.
How then shall the nurse simplify
the task of the mother, so that it will
not be unbearably difficult for her. In
the first place, by inculcating the simple
principles of prenatal care such,
for instance, as are so clearly laid
down in the pamphlet published by
the Maternity Center Association of
New York, the New York State Department
of Health, the Chicago
Health Department, etc.—she can make
it highly probable that the mother will
come out from her confinement and
delivery rested rather than wrecked
by the trying though perfectly physiological
experiences she has passed
through. If, further, she has herself
become thoroughly grounded in the
principles underlying the establishment
and maintenance of successful
maternal lactation, and has sufficiently
impressed upon the new mother the
possibility as well as the desirability
of her feeding her baby upon breast
milk, the only thoroughly satisfactory
infant food that there is, she will have
eliminated from the horizon of her
client the whole bugbear of artificial
feeding. This alone will constitute a
priceless bit of simplification, as any
mother who has ever fed her baby on
formulas can testify. The details of
artificial feeding, if this is undertaken,
need not be gone into here as they
must be adjusted by the individual
physician. It is encouraging to see,
however, how doctors are increasingly
turning toward the simple dilutions of
whole milk, and getting away from
the cumbersome, involved, and impressive
but by no means more scientific
formulas of the olden days.
Another condition especially observed
by those who advocate the use of lactic
acid milk and by those who are interested
in promoting breast feeding, is
the almost complete elimination of the
old-fashioned "colic." The principle
must be grasped, however, that the
healthy baby never overeats and that
so-called colic is a pain of hunger or
temporary discomfort or pressure due
to an air bubble in the stomach (which
is adjusted mechanically by holding
the baby over the shoulder). Revolutionary
as this may seem to one
trained, as the writer was, in the
pediatrics of twenty or more years
ago, it is easy to understand and still
easier to apply. When one has seen
so-called "colic" disappear time and
time again when a baby is allowed to
take his fill of whatever food is being
given him, without any of the dire
results that we used to be taught were
sure to follow such eating to repletion,
it is not difficult to gain converts
among doctors, nurses, and mothers, to
this satisfactory, humane method of
feeding babies.