What a Young Husband Ought to Know

by Sylvanus Stall

No thoughtful or considerate husband would desire to impose upon his wife such exactions as would result in her certain discomfort, and possibly in such permanent physical injuries as are quite sure to follow.

One of the medical journals recently contained an incident narrated by a physician who had attended a woman in five different confinements. In each instance the physician noticed that about the seventh or eighth day the temperature of the patient indicated some unusual physical disturbance or irregularity. In the last confinement, when the physician called to mind similar conditions during previous periods of convalescence, he decided to discover the cause, and, by questioning the patient very critically, learned that the guilty husband was the occasion of his wife's trouble. While such occurrences are shameful in the highest degree, yet it is possible that such gross conduct is the occasion of many relapses upon the part of convalescing mothers, and to this it is probable that many deaths may easily be attributable.

That some husbands are brutal in this respect, we need but simply to name that an eminent physician of Philadelphia has stated that a legal friend had told him that he had procured a divorce within two years from her marriage for a wife whose charges of cruelty were sustained by the evidence that three days after her confinement her husband had driven the nurse out of his wife's room in order that he might make this cruel exaction of her.

After the little stranger is safely landed, bathed, dressed, and has had a sufficient period of rest, the matter of nourishment is likely to come up for consideration. The food which nature has provided is best suited to the physical requirements of the child, and is found in the mother's breasts. The earliest secretions of her breast constitute what is called colostrum, and is purgative in character, designed to cleanse the child's bowels of the meconium, or tar-like substance, with which they are filled previous to birth. Other food should never be substituted until failure has resulted in an honest, serious effort to conform to nature's purpose. If for any reason the child cannot obtain the nourishment which should be provided by the mother, it needs very little food until the third day.

If the serious results attendant upon artificial food and the provision of wet-nurses were fully understood, the terrible consequences which come to both the children and their parents, as the result of such courses, would be studiously avoided. The desire to escape the nursing and care of children, so as early to return to the rounds of social duties and marital excesses, is a great mistake. The well-being of the mother, as well as of the child, is dependent upon the fulfillment of the natural obligations which are inseparable from the relation of motherhood.

In large cities there are women who lead dissolute lives, put away their own children, and then rent themselves out as wet-nurses. When interviewed they tell plausible stories, and ingratiate themselves sometimes into good families, to render the double service of nurse and artificial mother. Many of these women are not only devoid of moral character, but bring to the child the degenerating influences which are inseparable from the vice and impurity which is a part of their own being. Not infrequently these women bring with them the after-effects of gonorrhea and syphilis, and the innocent child, which is entitled to the nourishment from the body of its own mother, is subjected by unthinking parents to the necessity of feeding at fountains which flow with corruption, disease and death.

It is on this very account that the children of the middle and even lower classes are generally stronger physically, intellectually and morally, than the children of those whose wealth and inclination incline them to dissipation and excess, to late hours and rich food, and who from simple preference subject their children to artificial food, or to the dangers and diseases which are so often brought into the home by a wet-nurse and vicious nurse-girls.

Fatherhood, no less than motherhood, has its duties and its pleasures. It is not only the father's duty, but it ought also to be his pleasure, to look after his own children. Some husbands speak of "the baby" as though it belonged wholly to the wife, and not to them. The thought of caring for or tending the child seems to be as foreign to their minds as though it were a child adopted by their wives from a foundling asylum.

It is not only the privilege, but the honor of the father to be found enjoying the pleasure and satisfaction of holding and caring for his children at proper times and intervals of leisure.

One of the prettiest pictures of home life is a painting in one of the galleries of Europe of the king of Belgium, upon his hands and knees upon the floor of the nursery, playing horse with his own royal children.