The scientific and successful raising of a baby on the bottle depends upon two distinct lines of care and caution: the selection of the food to be supplied, and the care of the bottles. The best of food in an unsanitary bottle or drawn through an unclean nipple becomes dangerous to baby’s health.
In choosing artificial food for your baby, remember that even physicians differ on this question. Most American specialists for children insist that fresh cow’s milk, properly modified, is the only substitute for mother’s milk. European authorities recommend goat’s milk. And there are other recognized authorities on baby-health who have found it advisable to prescribe for delicate bottle-fed babies a combination of milk and patent food. Not only must the mother consult her family physician on this question, but, with the physician, she must watch the effect of the chosen food on the baby.
Vomiting, restlessness, sleeplessness, and the condition of the bowels, all tell the tale of food that is not being assimilated.
In this connection the inexperienced mother must understand that there are two forms of vomiting in the young baby; or, more properly speaking, there is a difference between vomiting and regurgitation—slight, to be sure, but worth watching. Regurgitation is merely the overflow of milk when the baby has taken too much. It follows almost immediately upon having the breast or bottle taken away, and the milk is in practically the same condition as when it entered the stomach. But when the baby vomits habitually after feeding, and the milk is curdled or tough or sour, there is something wrong with the bottle diet.
The bowels are a sure indication of the way in which the bottle diet agrees or disagrees with the baby. When the passage is hard and bullet-like, when it shows curds or white lumps like cheese, or when mucus is present or there is diarrhea, the mother may be sure that the food does not agree with her baby, and the doctor should be consulted immediately.
No medicine should be given in such cases without consulting a doctor. What the baby needs is not dosing, but the right sort of food, the food its stomach will digest.
At one contest in the midwest the mother of a little prize winner told me that, at eleven months, she almost lost her baby. She had changed diet time and time again, varying from certified cow’s milk to a well-known patent food. The baby was reduced to a skeleton when the physician decided to try not milk, but cream, diluted with barley water. The change in baby’s condition was immediate, and it continued to thrive without further change of diet. On the other hand, some babies fed on this modified cream would not thrive.
Frankly, feeding a baby deprived of breast milk often resolves itself into an experiment; but an experiment which must be conducted in an intelligent manner, with the advice of a physician. Do not consult your neighbor, no matter how many babies she has raised successfully. The bottle food which was nourishment to her babies may be poison to yours. There are no hard and fast rules for bottle foods. Each baby is a case unto itself and requires the most delicate attention and unrelenting vigilance. Even two babies in one family may require different forms of artificial nourishment, or at least different modifications of cow’s milk.
Perhaps there is no phrase familiar to the maternal ear which is so generally misunderstood and abused as “modified milk.” It is confused with sterilized, pasteurized, and condensed milk, and with patent foods. In reality the phrase means any milk, other than mother’s milk, so modified by the addition of elements like water and sugar as to bring it as near as possible to the quality of breast milk.
The substitute for mother’s milk most generally approved by American pediatrists or specialists in the care of children is cow’s milk, carefully modified.