When a child has reached the age of eight or nine months the judicious use of farinaceous foods is not only unobjectionable but desirable; but even then it is most important to increase the quantity of the food very cautiously with the age, as well as to see that it has been well baked and afterwards boiled before being partaken of. In all cases it should be mixed with the milk.
When the child has reached the age of twenty months Dr Letheby advises the quantity of farinaceous food to be still further increased, and with a little egg given in the form of pudding until it attains its third year. At this period the child’s diet may also include bread and butter, and at the end of it well-boiled potato with a little meat gravy.
From the third to the fifth year he prescribes a small quantity of meat, and at the end of the ninth year the usual food of the family. During all these periods the use of milk as an important article of the dietary is enforced.
The following table by the late Dr Edward Smith, exhibiting the proportions between the daily quantities of carbon and nitrogen required at different periods of human existence, illustrates the great preponderance of nitrogen demanded by the infant over those who succeed him in the scale of age:
| Carbon. | Nitrogen. | |
| In infancy | 69 | 6·72 |
| At ten years of age | 48 | 2·81 |
| At sixteen years of age | 30 | 2·16 |
| At adult life | 23 | 1·04 |
| In middle life | 25 | 1·13 |
See Milk.
IN′FANTS′ PRESER′VATIVE. (Atkinson’s.) Carbonate of magnesia, 6 dr.; white sugar, 21⁄2 oz.; oil of aniseed, 20 drops; compound spirit of ammonia and rectified spirit, of each 21⁄2 fl. dr.; laudanum, 1 fl. dr.; syrup of saffron, 1 oz.; caraway water, q. s. to make the whole measure 1 pint. Antacid, anodyne, and hypnotic.
INFEC′TION. Syn. Contagion. The communication of disease, either by personal contact with the sick or by means of effluvia arising from their bodies. Attempts have been made to restrict the term contagion to the former, and infection to the latter, but this distinction is now discarded by the majority of writers. The following are the principal diseases which are commonly regarded as contagious:—Chicken-pox, cholera, cow-pox, dysentery, erysipelas, glanders, gonorrhœa, hooping-cough, hydrophobia, itch, measles, mumps, ophthalmia (purulent), plague, scald-head, scarlet fever, smallpox, syphilis, yaws. See Disinfectant,
&c.
INFLAM′MABLE AIR. See Hydrogen.