Infant diet : a lecture / by A. Jacobi. Delivered May 8, 1873. Revised, enlarged, and adapted to popular use by Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D.

  • Jacobi, A. (Abraham), 1830-1919.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Infant diet : a lecture / by A. Jacobi. Delivered May 8, 1873. Revised, enlarged, and adapted to popular use by Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    passed during the building up of the body of the plant. But in an animal, the action of the nerves and naus< cles determine other changes than those needed for the transformation of food into tissues, and on this account the problem is greatly complicated. Now, in comparison to the life of the adult, the life of a baby approaches to that of a plant. It has, indeed, a nervous system, and one exquisitely susceptible to influences brought to bear upon it from without, and especially to those that affect the two great surfaces of the body, the skin and the mucous membrane of the digestive canal. But this ner- vous system does not, like that of the adult, originate actions whose intensity is constantly liable to disturb the processes of nutrition. Thus, in an adult, dyspepsia is most frequently induced by exhaustion of the nervous system consequent upon over-work, by fatigues, depress- ing emotions, anxieties, etc. These are all as foreign to the tranquil life of the child as to the slumbering consciousness of wood anemones. But in the child, the same dyspeptic symptoms will be caused by ill-assorted food, acid fermentation in the stomach and bowels, and the nervous system, blameless as a cause of the disease, will suffer so violently from its eflfects, that life may bo destroyed in convulsions.