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A Manual of What Every Mother Should Know
A Manual of What Every Mother Should Know Author:Edward Ellis Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3weakness, disease, and even death, which their wilful neglect may entail. It is the duty of medical men to discountenance strongly the pretexts of fashionable mothers to obtain a wet- nurs... more »e, that they may be free to rush back into the giddy scenes of frivolity and pleasure. " Can a woman forget her sucking child ?" It seems that in these days, not a few, but multitudes of women can and do forget them, and elect rather their own selfish gratifications than the life-long good of the helpless babes entrusted to their care. This is not the type of womanhood which has earned for women their character for nobility and self-sacrifice. Nor let such flatter themselves that they shall escape the Nemesis of outraged nature. " A mother who does not suckle is more liable to peritonitis, inflammation of the uterus, abscesses in the breast, cancer of the breast and womb " (Decaisne). And it is certain that suckling exercises a most beneficial influence in causing tonic contraction of the womb. How constantly are we called upon to treat ladies suffering from backache, aching in the thighs, inability to stand long or walk much. Such have sensations of weight and bearing down, etc., and the cause is very often found to be a kind of flabby enlargement of the uterus, which has never properly contracted after confinement, and which leads, if neglected, to falling of the womb, to its being bent out of place, either forwards or backwards, to inflammation of its cavity, to divers kinds of " whites," and, in a word, to all sorts and conditions of uterine disorder. " Bringing up by hand " may be said to be always fraught with more or less peril to the infant. Dr. Youl, the city coroner of Melbourne, put this somewhat strikingly when he explained to a jury quite recently, " that if 100 children were put out to dry nurse with the b...« less