Page:Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.djvu/2118

1908 infant with syrup of poppies, or some narcotic potion, to insure tranquillity to the child and give the opportunity of sleep to herself. The fact that it used to be the common practice of wet nurses to keep secret bottles of these dangerous syrups and to use them to a terrible extent, is notorious; and too great care cannot be taken by any employer of a wet nurse to-day to guard her child against the possibility of such ignorant or unprincipled treatment, remembering in all cases to consult a medical man for her infant, in preference to following the counsel of her nurse.

The knowledge of the management of infants, like the mother's love for her offspring, seems to be born with the child, and to be a direct intelligence of Nature. It may thus, at first sight, appear as inconsistent and presumptuous to tell a woman how to rear her infant as to instruct her in the manner of loving it. Yet, though Nature is unquestionably the best nurse, Art makes so admirable a foster-mother, that no sensible woman, in her novitiate of parent, would refuse the admonitions of art, or the teachings of experience, to consummate her duties of nurse. It is true that, in a civilized state of society, few young wives reach the epoch that makes them mothers without some insight, traditional or practical, into the management of infants; consequently, the cases wherein a woman is left to her own unaided intelligence, or what, in such a case, may be called instinct, and obliged to trust to the promptings of Nature alone for the well-being of her child, are very rare indeed. Again, every woman is not gifted with the same physical ability for the harassing duties of a mother; and though Nature, as a general rule, has endowed all female creation with the attributes necessary to that most beautiful, and, at the same time, holiest function—the healthy rearing of their offspring, the cases are sufficiently numerous to establish the exception, where the mother is either physically or socially incapacitated from undertaking these duties herself, and where, consequently, she is compelled to trust to adventitious aid for those natural benefits which are at once the mother's pride and delight to render to her child.

The Lungs.—Respiration.—The first effect of air on the infant is a slight tremor about the lips and angles of the mouth, increasing to twitchings, and finally to a convulsion of the lips and cheeks, the consequence of sudden cold to the nerves of the face. This spasmodic action produces a gasp, causing the air to rush through the mouth and nostrils and enter the windpipe and upper portion of the flat and contracted lungs, which immediately expand. This is succeeded by a few faint sobs or pants, by which larger volumes of air are drawn into the chest, till, after a few seconds, and when a greater bulk of the lungs has become