Chapter IX: Alcohol and Nursing Mothers

It frequently happens that the nursing mother is unable by reason of defective digestive apparatus, or imperfect assimilative powers, to supply sufficient nourishment for her babe. In such case she is often advised to drink ale or beer. It is true that these liquors will excite the secretions of the mammary gland, but it is increase in quantity, not in quality, for the milk is impoverished by the added water and alcohol, taken in the beer. Milkmen sometimes salt cows heavily so that they will drink largely of water, and thus give more milk, but one quart of good, rich milk is worth three quarts of the poor, thin stuff resulting from such method. It is proper feeding, and care, that ensure good milk.

When women complain that they are unable to nurse their babies the cause is often an error in diet. Too great reliance is put upon meat as strength-giving. While meat, used in moderation, may be valuable to many persons, the nursing mother should not depend upon it to any great extent. She will find farinaceous foods, with plenty of warm milk, what she most requires. At bedtime she should have a bowl of well-cooked oatmeal gruel, diluted with rich milk, and sweetened, if she prefer it so. The milk should be added to the gruel while it is boiling, as it digests more readily if scalded. People who cannot, or think they cannot, take milk of itself, often find it easy to digest it, after it is scalded in the gruel. Anything that a mother can do in the way of nourishing her babe will be done upon such a diet, that is, farinaceous foods and milk. Sweet fruits are of course valuable also, as tending to keep the system in good order.

It is well to bear in mind that it is not the quantity of food eaten, but that which is digested, and assimilated, that goes to build up the tissues of the body. So the habit of eating between meals is pernicious, as it disturbs the digestive processes, and robs the stomach of much-needed rest. This habit is the cause, in many cases, of the falling off in the milk after the first month or two.

As nourishment for both mother and babe can come from food only, good appetite, and good digestion are essential to health and strength. The very best help towards gaining a good appetite is exercise in the open air. All mothers recognize the need of keeping their little ones out of doors a while every day, but all do not see the necessity of the same mode of life for themselves. Dr. Nathan S. Davis has said: "I have persuaded thousands of mothers to try fresh air, instead of wine or beer, with gratifying results." The mother who takes her babe out, herself, for its daily airing, is laying up stores of health and vitality, to aid her in providing for the needs of the little one, dependent upon her.

Good digestion is as essential as good appetite. Alcohol, whether in beer, wine, whisky, or any other form, is injurious to the stomach, and a hinderer of digestion, hence must do harm, rather than good, to the mother in search of added nourishment for her babe.

Dr. Condi says:--

"The only drink of the nurse should be water or milk. All
fermented and distilled liquors, as well as strong tea and
coffee, she should strictly abstain from. Never was there a more
absurd or pernicious notion than that wine, ale or porter is
necessary to a nursing mother in order to keep up her strength,
or to increase the quantity, and improve the properties of her
milk. So far from producing these effects, such drinks, when
taken in any quantity, invariably disturb more or less the
health of the stomach, and tend to impair the quality, and
diminish the quantity, of nourishment furnished by her to her
infant."

Dr. William Hargreaves says:--

"Every farmer knows that all a healthy cow requires to give good
milk and butter is, to give her good feed, and pure water; and
he also knows that the way to make a cow give poor watery milk,
which they might churn until doomsday without obtaining butter,
is to feed her on distillery slops, or grains from the brewery.
It is also well known that cheese cannot be made from such milk,
it being deficient in curd, or casein.

"Alcohol is not only useless but injurious; for children whose
mothers try to keep themselves upon beer, etc., very frequently
suffer from vomiting and diarrhoea, and often from
convulsions. Sometimes a single glass of whisky, taken by the
mother, will produce sickness and indigestion in the child, for
twenty-four hours after.

"In the milk of a healthy woman the water ranges from 879 to 905
parts in 1,000. The oily substance ranges from 25 to 42; casein
from 15 to 39; sugar of milk from 31 to 45, and the salts from 1
to 4 parts in 1,000.

"Alcoholic drinks materially alter these proportions, for, on
the analysis of the milk of the same woman, a few hours before
and after the use of a pint of beer, it was found that the
alcohol increases the proportion of the water, and diminishes
that of casein; and that alcohol is very perceptible in it."

"The only rational way to be adopted by mothers to increase the
supply of nutrition for their infants, is to secure plenty of
suitable nutritious food, prepared in the way that will most fit
it for digestion, while they at the same time, avoid as far as
possible all fatigue, and mental excitement. It is impossible
that alcoholic beverages can add anything to the nutrition of
either the infant or mother."--Dr. Bussey, in _Stimulants for
Nursing Mothers_.

Dr. E. G. Figg, in _The Physiological Operation of Alcohol_, gives the analyses of the milk of a temperate woman in good health, and of a drinking woman as follows:--

Milk of temperate mother. Milk of drinking mother.

Salts, " " 8.50 Salts, " " 5.50
Casein, " " 3.0 Casein, " " 2.0
Oil, " " 7.50 Oil, " " 6.5
Water, " " 81.0 Water, " " 84.0
Alcohol, " " 2.0
------ ------
100.00 100.00

Dr. Edward Smith says in his _Practical Dietary_:--

"Alcoholics are largely used by many women in the belief that
they support the system, and maintain the supply of milk for the
infant; but I am convinced that this is a serious error, and is
not an infrequent cause of fits and emaciation in the child."

Dr. James Edmunds, of the Lying-In Hospital, London, Eng., says in _Diet for Nursing Mothers_:--

"The nursing mother is peculiarly placed, in that she has to
provide a supply of nutriment for the child which is dependent
upon her, as well as for the ordinary requirements of her own
system. The nutrition of the child is to be provided for upon
the same principles, and by the same food-elements, as is the
nutrition of the mother, the only difference being that the
young child is possessed of less perfect masticatory and
digestive powers, and therefore requires food to be presented to
it in a state more simple, uniform, and readily assimilable than
the adult, who is furnished with strong teeth, and possessed of
a fully-grown stomach. The mastication, digestion, and primary
assimilation of the nursing infant's food is thrown upon the
mother's organs; but the tissues of the child are nourished
precisely as are the tissues of the mother, and a nursing mother
requires simply to digest a larger supply of wholesome, and
appropriate food. As a matter of course mothers with imperfect
teeth, or weak stomachs, cannot perform the digestion of extra
food for the infant so well as those mothers who have an
abundance of reserve power in their digestive apparatus; and
with such patients, the question arises, how are they to make up
for the deficiency which they soon experience in the supply of
milk? Such mothers appeal to their medical advisers to prescribe
some stimulant which will enable them to overcome the difficulty
which they experience, and often are greatly dissatisfied if
informed that there is no drug in the _materia medica_ which
will make up for structural weakness in the organs which
masticate, digest or assimilate the food. The proper course for
such women to adopt is a simple and rational one. They should
assist their digestive apparatus as much as possible by securing
an abundance of suitable and nutritious food, prepared in the
best way, and as is most digestible, while they should lessen
the demands of their own system by the avoidance of bodily
fatigue, and mental excitement. These means, aided by that
philosophical hygiene which is at all times essential to the
preservation of pure and perfect health, will enable them to
supply a maximum quantity of pure and wholesome milk; and
further calls by the child require proper artificial food.
Unfortunately such advice fails to satisfy many anxious mothers
who refuse to admit, or believe, that they are less robust, or
less capable, than other ladies of their acquaintance, and such
mothers fall easy victims to circulars vaunting the nourishing
properties of 'Hoare's Stout,' 'Tanqueray's Gin,' or Gilbey's
'strengthening Port,' circulars which are always backed up by
the example, and advice, of lady friends, who themselves have
acquired the habit of using these liquors, and who view as a
reproach to themselves the practice of any other lady who may
not keep them in countenance, as the 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 arguments are viewed with plausible
indifference, or insidious opposition, by persons whose
appetites and instincts have been undergoing debasement, and
perversion from the very dawn of their lives. My own deliberate
conviction is that nothing but harm comes to nursing mothers,
and to the infants who are dependent upon them, by the ordinary
use of alcoholic beverages of any kind.

"Infants nursed by mothers who drink much beer also become
fatter than usual, and to an untrained eye sometimes appear as
'magnificent children.' But the fatness of such children is not
a recommendation to the more knowing observer; they are
extremely prone to die of inflammation of the chest (bronchitis)
after a few days' illness from an ordinary cold. They die, very
much more frequently than other children, of convulsions and
diarrhoea, while cutting their teeth, and they are very liable
to die of scrofulous inflammation of the membranes of the brain,
commonly called 'water on the brain,' while their childhood
often presents a painful contrast--in the way of crooked legs,
and stunted or ill-shapen figure--to the 'magnificent,' and
promising appearance of their infancy.

"Those ladies who adopt the general views I have thus expressed
in relation to the nursing of their children, will want to know
what is the 'proper artificial food' with which to supplement
their milk when it is deficient in quantity. With some patients
the milk will fall off in quantity at the end of two or three
months. With others, although the quantity may not fall off, the
child seems unsatisfied; and there is a third class with whom a
profusion of milk is supplied, and the child thrives
exceedingly, but the mother gets flabby, weak, nervous, pale and
exhausted. In the last case, the mother is simply goaded on by
susceptibility of her nervous system, or by inordinate activity
of the breasts to yield an amount of milk which her digestive
powers are not equal to providing for. The treatment of such
cases should be simply repressive. The mother should separate
herself somewhat more from the child, and make a rule of only
nursing it from five to eight times in the twenty-four hours,
while the neck of the mother should be kept cool in regard to
dress, and cold sponging may be practiced carefully night and
morning. Her attention should be diverted by outdoor exercise on
foot, and additionally in a carriage if necessary. When the
mother's milk, though apparently not deficient in quantity,
proves unsatisfying to the child, great attention should be paid
to varying the diet of the mother, while such staple foods
should be taken as are most easily and thoroughly assimilated
into milk. The unsatisfying quality of the milk will generally
be remedied by taking a more varied diet, together with three or
four half pints of milk in the course of the day, accompanied
with farinaceous matter, as in the shape of well-made milk
gruel; and in case these measures fail, the only alternative is
to supplement the mother's milk by obtaining a wet-nurse to
suckle the child three or four times a day alternately with the
mother, or by feeding the child with proper artificial food. The
same measures may be resorted to where the milk, though
satisfying in character, is deficient in quantity; and in
preparing artificial food for the child it must always be
remembered that the food requires to be adapted to the stage of
development which is manifested by a young infant's digestive
organs. The infant's digestive apparatus is, in fact, designed
to digest milk, and to digest nothing else, but when the teeth
are cut farinaceous matter of a more or less solid character
should be gradually mixed with the milk. Almost all the
illnesses of infants under twelve months of age are caused by
some gross impropriety of diet, or otherwise, on the part of the
mother, for which the child suffers through the medium of the
milk, or they are caused by feeding the child with improper
artificial food. Thick sop, and many other articles often given
as food are as indigestible to an infant of three months old as
beefsteaks would be to a horse; and, until the child has cut its
teeth, it should have nothing but food resembling the mother's
milk as closely as possible.

"The proper way to feed an infant of three months old, whose
mother is only able to partially support it, is as follows: When
the child wakes in the morning it should not go to the mother,
but should be taken away by the nurse, and immediately fed from
the bottle, sucking its milk through a suitable teat. After the
mother has breakfasted the child may go to the breast, and
during the day it should be alternately fed from the bottle, and
nursed by the mother. At six o'clock the baby should invariably
be placed in its crib, by the side of the mother's bed, and fed
just before going to sleep, and the habit of going to bed at six
o'clock should be strictly and invariably enforced. If once the
child be allowed to come down to the family circle after dark,
the habit of going to sleep will be broken, and the child will
continuously cry to come down. In the course of the evening the
mother may nurse the child once, and at ten or eleven o'clock,
when the mother goes to bed, the child should be again fed from
the bottle, and the mother should have a basin of well-made
milk-gruel; and by her bedside should be placed, at the last
moment, as much gruel as she is likely to drink with relish
during the night. Whenever the child is restless it should be
taken out of its crib, gently, by the mother, and nursed, say
two or three times during the night, and put back again into its
crib, the child never being allowed to sleep with the mother.
When the night is fairly over, and the child awakens, it should
be fetched by the nurse, and have its first morning meal from
the bottle. This plan of feeding should be persisted in
continuously until the child has cut its teeth; and it is only
when every means have been taken to ensure the sweetness,
freshness and niceness, not only of the milk and water, but of
the bottle and of the teat, and the child still fails to get on,
that, in rare cases, I advise the admixture of a little
farinaceous matter, in the way of food containing one part milk,
and two parts of properly sweetened barley-water. As the milk
teeth come through, other farinaceous matter may be gradually
blended with the milk, and there is nothing better than to begin
at about eight months with a teaspoonful of baked flour, well
boiled in a pint of milk and water, or in the water, to be
afterwards cooled with milk. Oftentimes a little salt, as well
as sugar, will materially help its digestion. The child will do
well on that food--the quantity being duly increased--until it
has cut almost all its milk teeth, when it may eat bread and
butter, rice, and egg puddings, and occasionally eat a boiled
egg once a day. I believe that it is a great mistake to give red
flesh meat 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. During the first few days her milk did not
flow very freely, and she says her physician advised her to
drink beer. Consequently she commenced to drink a glass of beer
at each mealtime, and a bottle during the night. During the
first six months she had sufficient milk for her baby; but
before the end of that time she had begun to suffer from
flatulency, constipation, gaseous and acid eructations, what she
calls 'heart-burn,' and sometimes vomiting. During the last
three months she has suffered, in addition to the preceding
symptoms, one or two attacks each week of extreme pain, from the
lower point of the sternum to the back between the scapula,
accompanied by retching, or severe efforts to vomit. To relieve
these attacks she has taken liberal doses of gin, in addition to
her regular supply of beer. Now at the end of nine months, her
milk has nearly ceased to flow, her bowels are costive, her
stomach tolerates only small quantities of the simplest
nourishment, her flesh and strength are very much reduced, her
weight being only 96 pounds; and yet she thinks both the beer
and gin make her feel better every time she takes them. Such is
the delusive power of the anaesthetic effect of alcohol. A
persistence in the same management would probably terminate
fatally in from six to twelve months more, from chronic
gastritis, and inanition. But if she will rigidly abstain from
all alcoholic remedies, and take only the most bland,
unirritating nourishment, aided by mildly soothing and
antiseptic remedies, and fresh air, she will slowly recover."

In a clinical lecture delivered before the Senior Class in the Northwestern University Medical School, Dr. Davis told of a case similar to the preceding:--

"The flow of milk in her breasts has also diminished to such a
degree that she does not have half enough for her baby. Yet she
says the _beer_ makes her feel better after each drink, and that
the _gin_ helps to relieve the severe attacks of pain, and
consequently she thinks she could not do without them. It is
undoubtedly true that the patient feels temporary relief from
the anaesthetic effect of the alcohol in her beer and gin, just
as she would from any anaesthetic or narcotic. And it is equally
true that so long as the alcohol is present in her blood it so
modifies the hemoglobin and albuminous constituents, as to
diminish the reception and internal distribution of oxygen, and
thereby retards metabolic changes. But the combined influence of
the alcohol in retarding the internal distribution of oxygen and
the drain upon the nutritive elements of her blood, in
furnishing milk for her baby, led to rapid impoverishment of the
blood and tissues, and the early establishment of a sufficient
grade of gastritis to cause indigestion, frequent vomiting, and,
later, paroxysms of severe gastralgia, with general emaciation,
and loss of strength.

"In accordance with the present popular ideas, both in and out
of the profession, this patient tells me she has tried a great
variety of foods, peptonized, sterilized, and predigested, but
all to no purpose. And why?--Simply because her troubles are not
in the kind of food she takes, but in the morbid condition of
her blood, and of the mucous membrane and nerves of her stomach.
Consequently the rational indications for treatment are: (_a_)
to get her stomach and blood free from the alcohol of beer and
gin; (_b_) to encourage the reception and internal distribution
of oxygen by plenty of fresh air; (_c_) to give her the most
bland, or unirritating food in small, and frequently repeated
doses, of which good milk with lime-water, and milk and
wheat-flour gruel are the best; (_d_) such medicines as possess
sufficient antiseptic, and anodyne properties to allay the
irritability of the gastric mucous membrane, and lessen
fermentation."