The Strand Magazine : an illustrated monthly. Vol. 1, no. 4, April 1891 / edited by George Newnes.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Strand Magazine : an illustrated monthly. Vol. 1, no. 4, April 1891 / edited by George Newnes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A GERMAN BABY. done up tight and flat as a Red-skin baby is, must be almost as safe on a top-shelf as on the ground. The close swaddling and padding of baby is found, the more we con¬ sider it, to be the fashion among both civilised and barbarous kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, where women are very hard-worked. It is easy to understand how that must be. When the mother digs and plants the soil, and grinds the corn, draws the water and cooks the food for her hus¬ band and children—as does the savage woman of every clime—when she spins and brews, and makes and mends, and cooks and cleans, as does the house¬ wife of almost every de¬ gree in almost every country of Europe ; when the mother has thus her hands full of toil or occu¬ pation from morning till night, and when the ex¬ pense or the convenience of a nurse is not avail¬ able, what can she do, what must she do, with baby, but contrive some means of keeping him from troubling her and at the same time from damaging himself ? Therefore the American Indian papoose is bound and laced in the thing we have seen ; therefore the Amazon Indian child is slung in a close net-like ham¬ mock from tree to tree ; therefore the New Guinea child hangs like a bunch of onions in a bag- net either from a jutting bamboo of his father's hut or on his mother’s back by a strap passed across the forehead ; and therefore the European baby of several countries is wrapped and padded in the ways we are about to describe. /r !/'■ (,z X 't***mjy s / Of all house-wives in Europe, probably the German is the hardest worked, and of all European mothers the German practises most com¬ pletely the art of swathing and pad¬ ding her baby, and of putting it on the shelf. The Ger¬ man baby is swaddled in a long, narrow pillow, which is made to meet completely round him, being tucked up over his feet and turned under his solemn chin. Three bands of gay blue ribbons are then passed round the whole bundle and tied in large, florid bows about where his “baby was found asleep IN THE SNOW.” chest, his waist, supposed to be. ana his In this ankles may be he can be guise