OUR BABIES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 708, 30 September 1914, Page 7

OUR BABIES.

Published under the auspices of the Societ3 r for the Health of Women and Children. " It is wiser to put up a fence at the top of a precipice than to maintain art ambulance at the bottom." HEALTHY HABITS FOR • CHILDREN. I cloßed last week'd article hy quoting from Professor Coleman's Health Primer for Children, with a view to showing how much can be done—even after the golden opportunity of early infancy ha 3 passed—in the direction of forming habits tending to healthy developments. The last paragraph, dealing with the question of the teeth, read as follwos: £ '"Some children wiJ not eat anything hard. They do not like hard crusts of bread, 'or tough bread. You would almost think they had false teeth, and were afraid of breaking them by eating anything hard or tough. Gums would do aa well as teeth for the food they eat. Thttf do not use their teeth. So the teeth decay, and are taken away from them." I have repeated this quotation because it seems to me such an excellent introduction to an interesting and instructive interview with Dr Harry Campbell, which appeared recently in one of the London newspapers. I give the account of this interview just an it was printed at Home. SCOTCH SPECIALITS'S ATTACK ON PORRIDGE. RESPONSIBLE FOR WORST , TEETH IN THE WORLD. MILK PUDDINGS CONDEMNED. A Scots doctor, and a Campbell, baa attacked porridge! The Daily Sketch happened to meet Dr Harry Campbell yesterday. Dr Campbell is a nerve specialist of Wimpole street, chief of staff to the West End Hospital for nervous diseases, and the question was raised by a philanthropist's , recent gift of £SOOO towards providing cheap falße teeth for the poor. "We "are a pap-fed nation," said Dr Campbell. "The Scotch have the worst teeth in the world, with the English people a good second. Do you know that in Great Britain there are: '" 200 million bad teeth. 200 million socket abscesses. 30 million soot abscesses. - And they are' preventable. "Not 1 per cent, of our children go through their first denture, which lasts from the agq of six months to seven years, without a speck of decay." TEETH OUT OF WORK. "Why? Because we give, their teeth no work to do. We feed them on pap—on porridge, bread and milk, milk puddingß, rice puddings, buns, and cakes. "The taeth are to chew with. For all the use we put them to, we might as well not have them. Particularly should children be taught to chew their food and given crusts and long French loaves to exercise their teeth on. "Later on in life, if the beginning has been good, it does not matter so mueh; because we eat more .meat then, and that needs chewing. ENGLISHMEN'S LOST JAWS. v "I tell you that not a single normal jaw has been bred in Great Britain during this generation—the generation of pap. When a man or woman comes in to me with a normal jaw, I eay to myself, 'You're from abroad.' "The shape of. the mouth, the breath,and health of the blood and the digestion all suffer from ignorance of proper diefr. The important question of to-day is not the Home Rule controversy, but the education of people in the care of their mouths. "You will find good teeth amongst the Jewish popualtion of the East End; but there the poor mothers feed their children carefully and scientifically, and you will find that they give them crusts and bones with their food, so that their teeth can have something to do. (Memo, by "Hygiea."—-Add to this, that Jweish babies start life by being suckled for the first year, and get plenty of mouth exercise in that way. The Jews have an almost religious repugnance to failure in maternal duty and resorting to artificial feeding in early infancy.) "Down with pap, and porridge, and buns! Give the children of a great people the.ir proper crusts!" COMMENT BY "HYGEIA." The above digest of what Dr Harry Campbell said to the reporter doeß rather scant justice to the forcible views of a physician who is recognised all over the world as a clear and profound expone n t of the disastrous results of the habits of modern civilisation in regard to food and feeding. He shares this position with another doctor of great ability—namely, Dr Sim Wallace, leading London dentist, who looks at the matter very practically from the point of view of his own specialty, and is quite in accord with Dr Harry Campbell. They both insist on the need for regular daily exercise for the mouth and surrounding parts, from birth onwards; and they show how tbe parts which dominate the dealing with food, and the proper intake of cir, at the porta of entry, are fashioned well or ill in mouth, nose, and throat during the first year or so of life —the main determining factors for good or ill being active, vigorous use and exercise on the one hand, or relative passivity and idleness en the other. For the first year, breast-feeding, plenty of pure eool sir, plenty of outing, plenty .of vigorous exercise afford tbe ideal conditions, while indolent bot-tle-feeding with a large-holed teat, aggravated by leading a stuffy, coddled, lazy life, provide the opposite extreme. We had several long talks with Dr Campbell and Dr Sim Wallace, and found.tbem greatly in sympathy with what the Society is duing in New

Zeahnd—indeed, they, both of them, expressed their willingness to write articles on th 9 lines stated in this column, provided something similar could be done in a consistent, authoritative way in England. When quoting the figures referred to above, as to tbe enormous number of decayed teeth present in the average mouth, Dr Hay Campbell enlarged on the disastrous effects of this on digestion, owing to the constant stream of microbes passing from the cavities ahcJ other auppusrating regions of decayed teeth into the stomach—let alone the infections of the tonsils and throat arising form the same cause. OTHER GOOD HARD FOODS. It would be very wrong to suppose that these reformers limit themselves, in the way of hard food,to such things as crusts. They strongly advocate that, from whatever source derived, a large proportion of the food should be such as demands active chewing; they both strongly condemn the spoiling of meat by mincing before it is eaten, and they both strongly recom-. mend the daily use of raw ripe apples or other such wholesome natural foods. BLACK BREAD. In connection with the general superiority ot the teeth of Jewish children in London slums refered to by Dr Herry Campbell,l may say that the best teeth we saw at Home were those of East End Russian Jews, who said.that their main food in childhood had been hard black rye Dread. I have remarked excellent teeth elsewhere among people fed ot rye bread. —use, no doubt, to the hard work it entails in mastication, and the consequent full supply of blood to jaws and teeth. In Scotland of old, honest, plain, hard oatcakeB —not spoiled by being made luxurious and easy to eat by mixing meal with fat —supnlied the necessary exercise which mads up for pap-feeding with porridge.