Health, husbandry, and handicraft / by Harriet Martineau.

  • Harriet Martineau
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health, husbandry, and handicraft / by Harriet Martineau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    all ranks of society into the account. In many a respectable kitchen, and almost universally in the poor, man's dwelling, a large proportion of the nourishing quality of food is lost by injudicious cookery. Other mischiefs in regard to aliment we see every day. We see hungry children, with their spectre eyes and pinched features, and the tell-tale down, like that of a callow bird, on their cheeks. We see infants gnawing at raw apples or carrots, to keep them quiet. We see the children of small shopkeepers, and artisans, and farmers killed with a surfeit of food. We specify those classes, because they, above others, fall into the mistake of cramming themselves and their children, under the notion of living comfortably, doing justice to the children, and so on. The doctors could tell a good deal about the amount of disease in people of all ages, where it is the habit of the household to eat every two or three hours, and have meat or fish at every meal. Liver complaints and fevers afflict, or carry off, the parents in many such households; and child after child dies of diarrhoea, inflammatory attacks, or actual surfeit. If the food eaten could be divided between the hungry and the over-fed, a noble group of English children would grow up, year by year, to serve and grace society, and enjoy their natural term of life, instead of being missed from the crib, and the little chair at table, and the father's knee in the evening, and the mother's heart through the whole weary day. So much for interference with nature about food. As to medicine, that may be called an interference with nature in every case : though the consequences of a yet worse disobe- dience may render physicking the lesser of two evils, on occasion. We need say nothing here of the practice of giving laudanum or other narcotics to infants, because anything that can be said has been said aloud, solemnly, vehemently, from one end of society to the other. Where we still see an infant laid down with a flannel steeped in cordial stuffed into its mouth; or the bottle and spoon with baby's sleeping mixture on the mantel-piece, it is either where an old nurse is about to give over her office to a new generation, or where the household is sunk so low in intem- perance and ignorance, that nothing can be done but through education, from the lowest point upwards. But there are still nurseries, from the tradesman's attic to the nobleman's suite of children's apartments, where quacking practices are going on, as fatal as the sleeping sop in the cellar or the gin-shop. We,
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