Excerpt from The Birmingham Medical Review, Vol. 29: A Monthly Journal of the Medical Sciences; January to June, 1891 One has only to look at the registrar-general's returns to see the enormous infant mortality in the country, especially in the manufacturing towns, where dry nursing is most common, owing to the employment of women in factories or other places away from home. Take our own town Birmingham for instance, and we find that out of every infants born, 170 die before they reach the age of one year. This is a dreadful state of things which every effort should be made to ameliorate, especially when we consider the remarkable fact that while the general death rate of the country has so improved of late years, little or no reduction of the infantile death rate has taken place. That it is preventable to a great extent is evidenced by the fact that the more the mothers are employed away from home the greater is the infant mortality, owing, no doubt, to the children being deprived of the breast and made to feed on substances utterly unfit for them. Thus in Blackburn, Preston, and other mill towns where women are largely employed, the infant mortality reaches a much higher figure than even in Birmingham. I do not mean to say that a great deal of the infant mortality is not due to other causes than improper dry nursing, but many affections, such as diarrhoea, teething, and convulsions are to a considerable extent produced or influenced by it, and would be greatly diminished were parents made to understand the necessity of giving proper food to their children. I am afraid that in this respect we, as a profession, are not quite free from blame, for I think that in many cases the medical attendant does not sufficiently impress upon the mother in cases of dry nursing the care that should be taken with the infant's diet, or when advice is given it is frequently physiologically incorrect, owing to want of knowledge of the chemical composition of the food he recommends. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.