Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/706

688 by anything else, has often restored a nursing baby to equanimity and to health.

Of less vital importance to a child perhaps than its food, yet claiming no little attention, is the clothing. The mothers of to-day have learned by experience how to clothe their children better than their mothers clothed them. It hardly seems possible that at one time the fashion of dresses low in the neck and with short sleeves was well-nigh universal for infants. The babies of the aristocratic and middle classes are, as a general thing, warmly and properly clothed. Careless attendants sometimes dress them too tightly, not allowing room for the expansion of the chest and lungs and interfering with the stomach. The senseless extravagance displayed in embroidered dresses for small children is reprehensible, and too fine dressing which prevents young children from obtaining proper exercise and trammels their freedom of play interferes with their health and development. American mothers are often very blameworthy in this respect.

The effects of disease on city infants are much more wide-spread than upon those in the country, not only of disease caused by improper feeding, to which we have already alluded, but more especially of those of a contagious nature. All sanitarians recognize this, and bewail it as one of the greatest evils of the present tenement system that so many children are crowded together in such houses, which become hotbeds of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles.

The terrible stories with reference to baby-farming which used to fill the columns of the newspapers are not so often seen in these days. Owing to the ventilation of the subject, the abuse has been very much lessened. But the question may be asked, Who supply the baby farmers? A few are those who would abandon their offspring, no matter how, to hide their shame, but for the most part they are poor women who are without a home, and must win a support the best way they can for themselves and their infants. They go out as wet-nurses; return to the factories and shops; or engage in general house-work.

The women who find their way, utterly destitute, to the lying-in institutions of a great city, amount to a considerable number in a year. Any of these coming to New York can go to Charity Hospital by obtaining a permit from the Superintendent of the City Poor. They leave the Maternity from ten days to two weeks after confinement. If they wish they can go with their infants to Randall's Island, or they can leave their children there while they go out to seek employment. At almost all other institutions the women are obliged to pay at least twenty-five dollars for board and care during confinement, or stay with their children three months. They can and often do remain with them a year.