The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

We were told in school that the fifth sense was “feeling,” but psychologists now regard this not as a single sense, but as a group, called the “dermal” or skin senses. The sense of touch and pressure, the senses of heat and cold, and the sense of pain are the principal ones of the group.

Our baby showed from the first that she was aware when she was touched. She stopped crying when she was cuddled or patted. She showed comfort in the bath, which may have been in part due to freedom from the contact of clothes, and to liking for the soft touches of the water. She responded with sucking motions to the first touch of the nipple on her lips. Preyer found the lips of new-born babies quite delicately sensitive, responding even to the lightest touch; and there are other sensitive spots, such as the nostrils and the soles of the feet.

On the whole, however, the rose-leaf baby skin proves to be much less sensitive than ours, not only to contact, but also to pain, and perhaps to heat and cold, though this has not been so thoroughly tested. This is not saying, of course, that the physiological effects of heat and cold upon the baby are unimportant.

Our baby had no experience of skin pain in her early days, and being kept at an equable temperature, probably received no definite sensations either of heat or of cold.

The foregoing are the “special senses,” that is, those that give impressions of external things, and have end organs to receive and make definite these impressions,—the eye at the end of the optic nerve, the different kinds of nerve tips in the skin, and so forth. Another sense now claims almost to rank with them,—the recently studied sense of equilibrium and motion, by which we feel loss of balance in our bodies and changes in their motion (changes only, for no one can feel perfectly smooth motion). This sense has been traced to the semicircular canals of the ear; and as this part of the ear is the oldest in evolution, and the rudimentary ears of the lower orders of animals are quite analogous to it in structure, biologists now suspect that hearing may be a more recent sense than we have thought, and that much which has been taken for sense of sound in the lower animals—even as high as fishes—may perhaps be only a delicate sense of motion.

I failed to watch for this motion sense in the baby. It would have been shown by signs that she felt change of motion when she was lifted and moved. Equilibrium sense she must have used as soon as she began to balance her little head, but in the first limp and passive days there was no sign of it. Still, there are tales of very young babies who showed disturbance, as if from a feeling of lost equilibrium, when they were lowered swiftly in the arms.

There is besides a sort of sensibility to vibration that affects the whole body. We know how much of the rhythm of music may be caught quite soundlessly through, the vibrations of the floor; and it is said (perhaps not altogether credibly) that it was thus that Jessie Brown recognized even the instruments and the tune at the relief of Lucknow by the tremor along the ground before a sound was audible. A jar, affecting the whole body, seems to be felt by creatures of very low organization. Babies are undoubtedly quite susceptible to jarring from the earliest days. Champney’s baby started when the scale of the balance in which he was lying immediately after birth sprang up.

Then there is the “muscle sense”—the feeling of the action of our own muscles; and a most delicate and important sense this is. It is safe to say that the baby had it from the first, and felt the involuntary movements her own little body was making, for it is hardly conceivable how else she could have learned to make voluntary ones. But that is another story, and comes later.

Even this does not exhaust the list of sensations the baby could feel. There was the whole group of “organic sensations,” coming from the inner organs,—hunger, thirst, organic pain. With older people, nausea, suffocation, choking, and perhaps some others might be added; but little babies certainly do not feel nausea,—their food regurgitates without a qualm. Nor do they seem to feel disagreeable sensations when they choke in nursing.

Organic pain our baby had her touch of in the usual form of colic; and hunger was obviously present very early, though perhaps not in the first two or three days. Thirst appeared from the first, and was always imperative. Of course, the milk diet largely satisfied it, but not entirely. Luckily our baby did not suffer from thirst, for grandma, nurse, and the good doctor had all entered early warning that “babies needed water,” and that many a baby was treated for colic, insomnia, nervousness, and natural depravity, when all the poor little fellow wanted was a spoonful of cool water. The baby’s body, as I said in my last chapter, is largely composed of water, and the evaporation from the loose texture of the skin is very great. After children can talk, they wear out the most robust patience with incessant appeals, night and day, for a “d’ink,” and consume water in quantities quite beyond what seems rational. But their craving is doubtless a true indication of what they need.