ought to
perform the office of a nurse? No specific time can be mentioned, and
the only way in which the question can be met is this: no woman, with
advantage to her own health, can suckle her infant beyond twelve or
eighteen months; and at various periods between the third and twelfth
month, many women will be obliged partially or entirely to resign the
office.[FN#4]

[FN#4] See "Weaning," p. 51.

The monthly periods generally reappear from the twelfth to the
fourteenth month from delivery; and when established, as the milk is
found invariably to diminish in quantity, and also to deteriorate in
quality, and the child is but imperfectly nourished, it is positively
necessary in such instances at once to wean it.

OF MOTHERS WHO OUGHT NEVER TO SUCKLE.

There are some females who ought never to undertake the office of
suckling, both on account of their own health, and also that of their
offspring.

THE WOMAN OF A CONSUMPTIVE AND STRUMOUS CONSTITUTION OUGHT NOT.--In the
infant born of such a parent there will be a constitutional
predisposition to the same disease; and, if it is nourished from her
system, this hereditary predisposition will be confirmed.

"No fact in medicine is better established than that which proves the
hereditary transmission from parents to children of a constitutional
liability to pulmonary disease, and especially to consumption; yet no
condition is less attended to in forming matrimonial engagements. The
children of scrofulous and consumptive parents are generally
precocious, and their minds being early matured, they engage early in
the business of life, and often enter the married state before their
bodily frame has had time to consolidate. For a few years every thing
seems to go on prosperously, and a numerous family gathers around them.
All at once, however, even while youth remains, their physical powers
begin to give way, and they drop prematurely into the grave, exhausted
by consumption, and leaving children behind them, destined, in all
probability, either to be cut off as they approach maturity, or to run
through the same delusive but fatal career as that of the parents from
whom they derived their existence."[FN#5] There is scarcely an
individual who reads these facts, to whom memory will not furnish some
sad and mournful example of their truth; though they perhaps may have
hitherto been in ignorance of the exciting cause.

[FN#5] Combe's Principles of Physi