Want of wholesome air is likewise destructive to many of the children born in great towns. There the poorer sort of inhabitants live in low, dirty, confined houses, to which the fresh air has hardly any access. Though grown people, who are hardy and robust, may live in such situations, yet they generally prove fatal to their offspring, few of whom arrive at maturity, and those who do are weak and deformed. As such people are not in a condition to carry their children abroad into the open air, we must lay our account with losing the greater part of them. But the rich have not this excuse. It is their business to see that their children be daily carried abroad, and that they be kept in the open air for a sufficient time. This will always succeed better if the mother goes along with them. Servants are often negligent in these matters, and allow a child to sit or lie on the damp ground, instead of leading or carrying it about. The mother surely needs air as well as her children; and how can she be better employed than in attending them?
A very bad custom prevails, of making children sleep in small apartments, or crowding two or three beds into one chamber. Instead of this, the nursery ought always to be the largest and best aired room in the house. When children are confined in small apartments, the air not only becomes unwholesome, but the heat relaxes their solids, renders them delicate, and disposes them to colds and many other disorders. Nor is the custom of wrapping them up too close in cradles less pernicious. One would think that nurses were afraid lest children should suffer by breathing free air, as many of them actually cover the child’s face while asleep, and others wrap a covering over the whole cradle, by which means the child is forced to breathe the same air over and over all the time it sleeps. Cradles indeed are on many accounts hurtful to children, and it would be better if the use of them were totally laid aside[[18]].
A child is generally laid to sleep with all its clothes on; and if a number of others are heaped above them, it must be overheated; by which means it cannot fail to catch cold on being taken out of the cradle, and exposed to the open air with only its usual clothing, which is too frequently the case.
Children who are kept within doors all day, and sleep all night in warm close apartments, may, with great propriety, be compared to plants, nursed in a hot-house, instead of the open air. Though such plants may by this means be kept alive for some time, they will never arrive at that degree of strength, vigour, and magnitude, which they would have acquired in the open air, nor would they be able to bear it afterwards, should they be exposed to it.
Children brought up in the country, who have been accustomed to open air, should not be too early sent to great towns, where it is confined and unwholesome. This is frequently done with a view to forward their education, but proves very hurtful to their health. All schools and seminaries of learning ought, if possible, to be so situated as to have fresh, dry, wholesome air, and should never be too much crowded.
Without entering into a detail of the particular advantages of wholesome air to children, or of the bad consequences which proceed from the want of it, I shall only observe, that, of several thousands of children which have been under my care, I do not remember one instance of a single child who continued healthy in a close confined situation; but have often known the most obstinate diseases cured by removing them from such a situation to an open free air.
Of Nurses.
It is not here intended to lay down rules for the choice of nurses. This would be wasting time. Common sense will direct every one to chuse a woman who is healthy, and has plenty of milk[[19]]. If she be at the same time cleanly, careful, and goodnatured, she can hardly fail to make a proper nurse. After all, however, the only certain proof of a good nurse, is a healthy child upon her breast. But, as the misconduct of nurses often proves fatal to children, it will be of importance to point out a few of their most baneful errors, in order to rouse the attention of parents, and to make them look more strictly into the conduct of those to whom they commit the care of their infant offspring.
Though it admits of some exceptions, yet we may lay it down as a general rule, that every woman who nurses for hire should be carefully looked after, otherwise she will not do her duty. For this reason parents ought always to have their children nursed under their own eye, if possible; and where this cannot be done, they should be extremely circumspect in the choice of those persons to whom they entrust them. It is folly to imagine that any woman, who abandons her own child to suckle another for the sake of gain, should feel all the affections of a parent towards her nursing; yet so necessary are these affections in a nurse, that, but for them, the human race would soon be extinct.
One of the most common faults of those who nurse for hire, is to dose children with stupefactives, or such things as lull them asleep. An indolent nurse, who does not give a child sufficient exercise in the open air to make it sleep, and does not chuse to be disturbed by it in the night, will seldom fail to procure for it a dose of laudanum, diacodium, saffron, or what answers the same purpose, a dose of spirits, or other strong liquors. These, though they be certain poison to infants, are every day administered by many who bear the character of very good nurses[[20]].