breads, toast, bland or subacid fruits (sweet apples, prunes,
figs, dates, pears, etc.); macaroni, browned rice (parched before
steaming), etc.; ice cream, custards, and rice puddings for desserts
after the seventh day. Three good meals a day, at eight and one and
six, with a couple of glasses of hot milk or cocoa or an eggnog at
five A.M., to be repeated at 9 or 10 P.M., with plenty of cold water
between the meals, will abundantly supply the necessary milk for the
growing babe. Tea and coffee are not of any special value in
encouraging a flow of milk.

The constant coaxing of the mother with "Do drink this," and "You must
drink this, or you won't have any milk," not only saddens her but
seriously upsets digestion and thus indirectly interferes with normal
lactation.

GETTING UP

Everybody should stay at home and away from the mother and her new
born child until after the seventh day, and then, if our patient is
normal, visitors may call, but should not stay longer than five
minutes. The convalescing mother will improve faster without the
neighborhood gossip, or the tales of woe so often carried by
well-meaning, but woefully ignorant acquaintances.

When the hard ball-like mass can no longer be felt in the lower
abdomen, when the lochia has passed through the three changes already
mentioned, and the flow is whitish or yellowish, scanty and odorless,
the patient may sit up in a chair increasingly each day. Such
conditions are usually found anywhere from the tenth to the fifteenth
day. The patient first sits up a little in a chair--she has already
been exercising some in bed--and this enables her to sit up with ease
for a half-hour the first day, increasing one-half hour each day
during the week following. At the end of three weeks, she may be taken
down stairs providing there is ample help to carry her back up stairs.
After another week (at the close of the fourth), if the lochia is
entirely white or yellow, with no blood, she may begin carefully to go
about the house. There should be no lifting, shoving, pulling,
wringing, sweeping, washing, ironing, or other heavy exercise for at
least another two weeks, better four weeks. Any variance from this
program usually means backache, lassitude, diminished milk supply, and
frequently a general invalidism for weeks or months--sometimes years.

COMPLICATIONS

_Cystitis_, or painful urination, is avoided by tardy "getting up;"
quietly, slowly moving about; abundant w