perfection of all moral and
physical propriety. Unfortunately the pressure of such lady
friends is often so persistent as to paralyse the influence of a
conscientious and thoughtful medical adviser, while the
appetites and beliefs of such friends often throw them into
active antagonism to any medical adviser, who may not endorse
the habits in which, as they believe, and no doubt
conscientiously, duty to their child requires them to indulge.
The only course that a medical practitioner, whose family is
dependent upon his practice, can safely take with veteran
mothers on this question, is to let them have their own way
without reiterated admonition. When once they have acquired the
habit of depending upon large quantities of beer for nursing
their children, they become perfectly infatuated, and are
practically incapable of passing through the probationary
fortnight which takes place before the digestive apparatus can
work under its natural, but to them strange, conditions, while
the temporary longing for beer, and the sudden lessening of the
quantity of milk afforded by their strained and impoverished
systems, are at once set down as clear proofs that their medical
adviser is a crochetty, and dangerous person, who must be
superseded at the first convenient opportunity. Facts and
arguments have no more influence on such mothers than they have
upon opium-eaters, drunkards, or inveterate consumers of
tobacco; while the extreme propriety of conduct which these
ladies manifest, and the encouragement they receive from other
medical men, make the convictions based upon their own personal
sensations incontrovertible, and their position practically
unassailable. I think I might fairly say that among the
comfortable middle classes of society the views at present held
on this question are so deplorable that a large proportion of
children are never sober from the first moment of their
existence until they have been weaned; while often after a few
years the use of alcohol is again introduced to the children as
a 'medical comfort,' as a part of their regular diet, or as an
invariable accompaniment of all their juvenile visitation, and
company-keeping. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising
that temperance reformers appeal in vain on this question, and
that their facts and argum