to children in their early years, unless there be
some very special reason for it, and then it should only be
temporarily used; but nice potatoes, flavored with fresh gravy
from a joint, may be given at dinner, as the child becomes able
to feed itself. * * * * *

"Bear in mind that when you take wine, beer or brandy, you are
distilling that wine, beer or brandy into your child's body.
Probably nothing could be worse than to have the very fabric of
the child's tissues laid down from alcoholized blood."

Another English physician deplores "the pernicious habit of drinking
large quantities of ale or stout by nursing mothers, under the idea that
they thereby increase and improve the secretion of milk, whereas they
are in reality deteriorating the quality of that upon which the infant
must depend for health and life."

Dr. Edis says:--

"Infant mortality is mainly due to two causes, the substitution
of farinaceous food for milk, and the delusion that ale or beer
is necessary as an article of diet for nursing mothers. * * * *
* Countless disorders among infants are due simply and solely to
the popular fallacy, that the nursing mother cannot properly
fulfil her duties, unless she resorts to the aid of alcoholics."

Dr. N. S. Davis says:--

"The opinion prevails quite extensively among certain classes of
people, and with some physicians, that a liberal use of beer is
beneficial to women while nursing their children. They drink it
under the impression that it will both strengthen them and make
their milk more abundant. But I have never seen a case in which
it had been used regularly for any considerable period of time,
where it did not result in more or less indigestion from gastric
irritation and disordered secretions, and an early failure in
the secretion of milk. It probably never increases the flow of
milk any more than would the drinking of the same quantity of
pure water; while the alcohol it contains, by daily repetition,
induces congestion of the gastric mucous membrane, with
disordered gastric and hepatic secretions.

"A case strikingly illustrating these results was examined by me
to-day. The patient was a young married woman who was nursing
her first child, now nine months old. At the time of her
confinement she was in fair health, rather nervous temperament,
weight 120 pounds. Durin