Feeding-Bottles Objectionable

The next point, and one (if possible) more important, is that the feeding-bottle should be most scrupulously cleaned each time immediately after feeding, or small quantities of milk remaining in the tube or teat will become sour. The minutest particle of sour milk taken into the stomach with the other will act after the manner of a ferment, and favour the turning sour of the whole quantity.

It should, however, here be noted, that it does not follow that because when a child vomits its milk it is found curdled, that therefore the whole has been sour at the time of taking it. The first step in the digestion of the milk is that it is curdled by the gastric juice of the stomach, and afterwards dissolved by it. This process, however, is very different from the curdling of milk by its having turned sour out of the stomach, and it has a very different result in the process of digestion.

For the reason above-stated the writer entertains a strong objection to the use of feeding-bottles with the long india-rubber tubes attached to the teat. It is almost an impossibility to wash out the tube after use; at all events, as a matter of fact it too often is only half washed, and -so the milk gets turned.

There is another grave objection to these tubes - they engender and foster idleness on the part of the nurse. It is a common practice to put an infant into its bed or cradle, with the teat in its mouth and the bottle in bed, and there to leave it to suckle itself to sleep; which it generally does, sucking the while even after it has fallen asleep and its bottle is emptied. The child goes on sucking at the tube, but getting no food; the infant, in popular phrase, "sucks in wind." If it does not exactly suck the wind, its fruitless sucking at a piece of india-rubber keeps up secretion of gastric juice in the stomach. This, having no food to act upon, acts abnormally on the stomach itself, and sets up various disorders of that organ and of the intestines. Such a mode of nursing is little better than the "Gampish" trick of sticking into the child's mouth a raisin in a piece of muslin to "keep it quiet." They are alike occasions to the nurse to evade the duty of really hand-nursing and carrying the child in arms.

* Sugar of milk is made by the evaporation of the whey of cow's milk to a syrup, and its subsequent crystallization in the same way as sugar candy is made. Sugar of milk is chemically different from common sugar, and does not undergo the fermentation that the latter does. This furnishes an additional reason for its employment.

Beef-tea is the staple of existence in many cases of illness; it is food and physic both in some fevers. It must be most carefully made, on Liebig's principles. The heat employed should not exceed 1500. A thermometer, however, is not commonly at hand, but the meat should be cut up small and merely covered with water, in a bottle or jar, in a saucepan with cold water, near a fire, so as not to allow it to boil, but merely to stew for three or four hours. The fat may be separated by allowing it to get cold and them skimming it off. Mutton-broth might be made on the same plan, and would be more nourishing than that commonly made.

The principle on which this kind of beef-tea is made is the same as that on which Liebig's Extract of Meat should be prepared - viz., that of extracting the albuminous and meaty parts without extracting the gelatine, which is the least nutritious element of meat.

In the ordinary way of making beef-tea, by boiling lumps of meat, a strong jelly may be formed, and is supposed to show its strength; but each lump is really case-hardened, and the most nourishing part locked up in each piece. The explanation is, that flesh consists largely of albumen, which coagulates at 1500 F.; therefore the boiling temperature, 212° F., hardens the outer part at once, and slowly the interior. To give a culinary illustration, the best way to cook a boiled joint of meat is to put it into water already boiling, and continue boiling the requisite time; the outside is at once hardened, and the gravy is locked up inside.