At first the infant is usually bound tightly in swaddling clothes, lest it
move a limb, or for fear (like the down east orator) that it will "bust,"
and thus kept from air and exercise the first year or two, till it not
unusually becomes a stunted, rickety thing, hardly worth "transplanting"
or raising. Haven't you and I, kind reader, been subjected to something of
this sort of strait jacket insanity?--insanity of parents! And having been
tolerably strongly constituted from a "tough stock," we survived that
first wrong, whereas thousands of "nicer" babies have succumbed to the
swaddling and stifling process.
This is wrong, all wrong. The infant should be left free, at least as to
its chest and limbs, in order to breathe, kick, and expand. How happy the
little fellows are at evening to get rid of the murderous clothes which
have been bundled about them all day, and how they will fight and squirm
to get down on the carpet all stripped, and creep, or, if old enough, run
about in freedom! How they crow and prattle!
Now, don't swaddle them--a simple, easy bandage is early admissible,--or
cover their heads and faces with caps, sheets, or blankets. Inure them to
the air early and continually, and they will have less colds and
"snuffles" than if you confined them within doors. Give them air and
sunlight, and away with your "goose-grease." Yes, I have even known some
country people to apply skunk's oil, and others who larded the infant's
nose and chest for the "snuffles." Croup delights in such babies!
Then from the strait jacket, baby is taken to the other extreme--bare
arms, neck, and chest. Old Dr. Warren once said, "Boston sacrifices
hundreds of children annually by not clothing their arms and chests."
Once, when in remonstrating with a mother against this barbarous practice
of thus exposing her little one-year-old to a chilling atmosphere when my
arms and chest were not over warm as wrapped in an overcoat, she replied
to me,--
"O, the little dear looks so pretty with its little white arms and neck
all bare!"
"Yes," I replied, sorrowfully, "it will look pretty, also, laid out in its
coffin."
She was greatly shocked by the remark, which, however, too soon proved
true.
"Doctor's stuff" cannot counteract the fatal results of such ignorance and
exposures.