Advice to a wife and mother in two parts

by Pye Henry Chavasse

Distilled Water, eight ounces:

To make a mixture. Two tablespoonfuls to be taken, with two tablespoonfuls of the Acid Mixture, every four hours, while effervescing.

Take of—Citric Acid, three drachms;

Distilled Water, eight ounces:

Mix.—The Acid Mixture.

The best way of taking the above effervescing medicine is to put two tablespoonfuls of the first mixture into a tumbler, and two tablespoonfuls of the acid mixture into a wineglass, then to add the latter to the former, and it will bubble up like soda-water; she should instantly drink it off while effervescing.

626. In two or three days, under the above management, the size of the bosoms will decrease, all pain will cease, and the infant will take the breast with ease and comfort.

627. Second and succeeding confinements.—If the breasts are tolerably comfortable (which in the second and in succeeding confinements they probably will be), let nothing be done to them except, as soon as the milk comes, at regular intervals applying the child alternately to each of them. Many a bosom has been made uncomfortable, irritable, swollen, and even sometimes gathered, by the nurse’s interference and meddling. Meddlesome midwifery is bad, and I am quite sure that meddlesome breast-tending is equally so. A nurse, in her wisdom, fancies that by rubbing, by pressing, by squeezing, by fingering, by liniment, and by drawing, she does great good, while in reality, in the majority of cases, by such interference she does great harm.

628. The child will, in second and in succeeding confinements, as a rule, be the best and the only doctor the bosoms require. I am quite convinced that, in a general way, nurses interfere too much, and that the bosoms in consequence suffer. It is, of course, the doctor’s and not the nurse’s province in such matters, to direct the treatment; while it is the nurse’s duty to fully carry out the doctor’s instructions.

629. There is nothing, in my opinion, that so truly tells whether a nurse be a good one or otherwise, as the way she manages the breasts; a good nurse is judicious, and obeys the medical man’s orders to the very letter; while, on the other hand, a bad nurse acts on her own judgment, and is always quacking, interfering, and fussing with the breasts, and doing on the sly what she dare not do openly: such conceited, meddlesome nurses are to be studiously avoided; they often cause, from their meddlesome ways, the breasts to gather.