AIR AND EXERCISE.

Would that I could now impress upon your minds, in some good degree, the importance of AIR and EXERCISE in pregnancy.

See how well the Indian women get along with child-bearing; and you know they are active in their habits, and go a great deal in the open air.

How well, too, the poor, laboring people, the Irish and the Germans, get along in having children; and are not they obliged to work? Labor! verily thou art a blessing which we poor mortals do but poorly prize!

I must say to you, then, in my humble way, to all of you who are pregnant, DO NOT FAIL TO WORK. Work regularly—not too much at a time, but little and often, avoiding all extremes. Go out, too, EVERY DAY, and get the fresh air and light of heaven. So will you be rewarded for every thing you do.

LETTER XI.
MANAGEMENT IN PREGNANCY.

Of the Diet Proper in this Period—Animal and Vegetable Food—Superiority of the latter—The Drink.

I have in different places, in these letters, made some remarks on the subject of food and drink. I thought it necessary, however, to be a little more explicit on so important a matter.

I have in another letter said some things on the subject of those strange and peculiar longings which women sometimes experience in pregnancy, and have given you some advice on that point, which I wish you also to bear in mind in this place.

Have you not often heard women remark, that when they are pregnant they ought to eat more food than at other times, because they have two to support!

It is my duty to tell you in all frankness, as also earnestness, that if any one makes such a plea an excuse for dietetic indulgence; or if any one, from ignorance on the subject, sets to eating more freely in pregnancy than she would do at ordinary times, she will be very liable to harm herself seriously; and more than that, she may thus actually destroy her child, and have an abortion. If she should be so fortunate as to run clear of this sad evil, she would yet be liable to indigestion, costiveness, diarrhea, and all the long list of troubles that grow out of a disordered state of the stomach and alimentary canal at this period of her life.

Let us make a little calculation in regard to this matter of “having two to support” in pregnancy.

The growth of the fetus, as depending upon the mother, is in proportion to the length of time it is destined to remain in the womb.

In the first place, let us endeavor to ascertain the average weight of infants at birth. I do not know that we have any tables in this country that throw light upon the subject. We can, however, go to France, where the industry of physicians has reduced almost every thing connected with the medical art to figures and rules.

At the L’Hospice de la Maternité, in the city of Paris, the following results were ascertained in regard to 7077 cases of births:

34weighed from1to1½pounds.
69„2„2½„
164„3„3½„
396„4„4½„
1317„5„5½„
2799„6„6½„
1750„7„7½„
463„8„8½„
82„9„9½„
3„10„10½„

The average weight of children, then, at birth, would appear to be only between six and seven pounds. To make our calculation a safe one, we will suppose the average to be seven pounds.

There is also to be taken into the account the placenta, the membranes, and the liquor amnii, with which the child is surrounded. We may, then, make the following calculation:

Weight of thefetus, 7 pounds, or112ounces.
„placenta and membranes16„
„liquor amnii16„
In all144„

The number of days in a normal pregnancy is about two hundred and eighty. Reckoning three meals to a day—and some average more than this number—we have eight hundred and forty meals in the period. Now, according to the rule of three, if eight hundred and forty meals are to produce one hundred and forty-four ounces, how much must one meal produce? The answer, in decimals, is one hundred and seventy-one thousandths of an ounce, and a fraction over, or only a little more than one and one half tenths of an ounce at each meal.

You will then at once perceive how absurd it is for a woman to think that she must cram herself with food when she is pregnant, because of the notion that she has two to eat for instead of but one as at other times.

An intelligent and well-meaning lady of this city, Mrs. Pendleton, once put forth a work entitled, “Childbirth Made Easy.” The theory of the book was given on the authority of some English writers; and the purport of it was, that in order to bear and bring forth a child as easily as possible, the mother should live principally on fruit, more particularly toward the close of the period of gestation. The more substantial forms of food, it was contended, went to make too much bone in the fetus, and hence, that if these were avoided, the bones would be smaller and softer, in which case the birth would be the more easy. The work also recommended the water-treatment, and all other good rules of health.

I have no doubt that such a course of dieting in pregnancy would do a good deal toward mitigating not only the pains, but the dangers of the puerperal state.

The greatest of all dietetic enemies the world over is excess in quantity. You see, then, how admirably this theory would work in practice, although it might be false in real fact.

At any rate, you cannot be too careful of your diet when you are pregnant. There is no period of your lives in which it is more necessary to guard against all error than in this; and excessive alimentation, as I before remarked, is the greatest of all dietetic mistakes. It was one of Jefferson’s great canons of life, that we never repent of having eaten too little. So I will say after him, that I never knew a pregnant woman to suffer from taking too small an amount of nutriment, but I have known many to suffer from eating too much.

I have elsewhere remarked, that the period of pregnancy is necessarily attended by a greater liability to febrile and inflammatory disease than is ordinarily the case. Every one knows—that is, every one who knows any thing at all about the subject—that flesh-meat is more heating and feverish in its tendency than the farinacea and fruits. Mark, then, the evidence of the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, in taking away, for the most part, your appetite for animal food when you are pregnant. You are more liable to disease at this time than you are at others; and when disease does lay hold, it is more apt to go hard with you. God in His mercy then says, “I will take away the woman’s appetite for flesh when she is pregnant; yea, I will give her nausea, and loathing, and vomiting, for her heart is prone to lead her to excess.”

Do not then, I warn you, eat animal food at this time, even if you should have some appetite for it, as is sometimes the case.

Observe, also, how very sumptuously you may live in the vegetarian way. Indian mush; rye mush; rye and Indian bread; rye bread; corn bread, or Johnny-cake, as it is called in many parts; hominy; cracked wheat; wheaten mush; peas; beans; pumpkins; squashes; melons; apples, green, dried, or otherwise, with a little of milk and eggs, if need be, a little sweet; and a great many other things, which I need not now mention, which you can have according to the season. How well we could live, all of us, if we but would, without causing the farmers to wring the chickens’ necks off, to beat out the brains of the faithful ox and the affectionate cow with an axe, or to cut off the head of the innocent lamb. Do you ever think of these things when you eat meat?

What would you think of a woman who would eat pork meat and pork grease in pregnancy? You have heard a great deal of scrofula—that dreadful disease. In the long catalogue of maladies to which the human body is subject, there is not one more fearful, more dreadful than this. Scrofula is the swine’s disease; and the word is from the Latin scrofa, which means a sow. The swine is, probably, of all living creatures, the most subject to it. Think, then, of a woman’s eating such food when she is performing so important an office in God’s government as that of nourishing within her own body a living child. How much pain, disease, and suffering may she cause by her improper conduct at this time; or, on the other hand, how much happiness and physiological well-being, if she pursues a proper course. “Wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness” to her also as to her child.

If it were not wandering to much from the tenor of my subject, I might speak of the cheapness of living on vegetable food.

In this country of abundance we do not often see much misery arising from want of sustenance. Still such things do happen, and now and then in almost every part. True, our charities are munificent, our country fertile, our people industrious, and on the whole, benevolent; yet, there is always room for charity to work in. If we cannot find an object at home, assuredly we can somewhere; and we ought never to be satisfied with our course of self-denial, so long as there is one hungry mouth more in the wide world to fill. I have often thought of these things, I admit, when I have been eating things which I ought not to have eaten. I presume you have done the same thing all of you, for the human heart is as prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward, or a stone to fall to the ground.

If I could speak a word to a husband through you, on this important matter of diet in pregnancy, I would say to him, “Do not, as you love your wife, tempt her to any excess while she is pregnant. Remember how you loved her when she consented to give you that which was of incomparably more importance to you than the whole world besides, her own faithful, loving heart. Remember, too, how much she is made to suffer on your account. You can aid her by your example, and by your sympathy you can uphold her; but the pains, the agonies, and the perils of childbirth, these all are inevitably hers. I say, therefore, set your wife a good example yourself. If you do not thus aid her, surely as God liveth will you be made to suffer for your evil deeds.”

If you should think that I have, in the course of these letters, harped too much upon the subject of diet, I must ask your indulgence. The importance of the topic, I am sure you will admit; but as to my method of treating it, that is another thing. If you consider that I have made a mistake, that I have taken up too much of your time with that which you, perhaps, already understand, I hope you will set it down against me only as a mistake of the head, and not one of the heart, as the theologians say.